IMMORTALITY 


In the Light of (Modern “Ghought 


REV. F. C. CAPOZZI 











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BOOKS BY 
F, C. Capozzi 


Papacy and the War. 
Protestantism and the Latin soul. 
“Carmina Latina.” 


Dante. 





IMMORTALITY ~~~ 
In the Light of Modern Thought 


Mors Ianua Vitae 





REV. F. C.“CAPOZZI, Ph. B. 
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Wind Gap, Pa. 


This is one of the four works, of which “honourable mention” was 
made in the world-wide Churchman Contest, held in 1923-1924. 





BOSTON 


RICHARD G. BADGER, PUBLISHER 
THE GORHAM PRESS 


ee 








COPYRIGHT 1925 BY RICHARD G. BADGER 


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


THE GORHAM PRESS, BOSTON. U. S. A. 


INSCRIBED 


To the memory of all those American soldiers, who, by the 
heroic sacrifice of their lives on the battlefields of 
France gave us the most luminous proof that love 
1s stronger than death and that the soul, the 
divine inspirer of love, self-sacrifice and 
all transcending reality cannot be 
conquered by death. 


Dear Father Capozzi: 


Your essay is one of the noblest attempts I know 
of to explain the inexplicable thing, Immortality. You 
have given due recognition to the fact that it can never 
be completely explained: this is one of your essay’s 
merits. 


The bearing of ethical philosophy on Immortality, as 
emphasized in Chapter VI is, I think, a most valuable 
and permanent contribution to this vital subject. 


The thing, as a whole, is very erudite and the language 
a pleasant English with a high Latin content. It is 
very charming. 
WALTER KLEIN 


General Theological Seminary, 
New York City 


I wish to express my deep thankfulness to Messieurs 
F, M. Kirby, the Hon Major W. R. Coyle, A. P. Cleaver, 
Ch. A. Mills, the Ven. Dean Howard Diller, the Very 
Rev. Dean Wilmot Gateson, the Reverends E. S. Clat- 
tenburg, F. A. MacMillen, W. N. Weir, and all those who 
have helped, financially or morally, the publication of 


this work. 


babe Abo at 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


httos://archive.org/details/immortalityinligoOcapo 


TABLE OF CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION—PHILOSOPHICAL AND CHRISTIAN CON- 
CEPTION OF IMMORTALITY 

CHAPTER I. EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 

CHAPTER IJ. Bopy, Spirit AND IMMORTALITY 


CHAPTER III. SprriruaL TRANSCENDENCE OF THE 


SouL . ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° e e e 


CHAPTER IV. SELF-cONSCIOUS PERSONALITY AND 


IMMORTALITY BANE at tide Ws Waar eeE 


CHAPTER V. How CAn PERSONALITY SURVIVE? 


CHAPTER VI. MoraAL CHARACTER OF THE SOUL AND 


IMMORTALITY CM Nolet ag hee Ae AE ABS th 
CHAPTER VII. FairH AND IMMORTALITY 


CoNCLUSION 


PAGE 


11 


19 
oo 


59 


72 
82 


89 
99 





IMMORTALITY 
In the Light of Modern Thought 


INTRODUCTION 
PHILOSOPHICAL AND CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION 


OF IMMORTALITY 


I 


The progress of human thought may be likened to a 
conqueror’s chariot, which attains triumph by riding 
over heaps of ruins. The great leaders of that march, 
in order to build, have had to destroy. 

Copernicus, in order to give us our immense universe, 
had to replace the narrowing Plotemaic system of as- 
tronomy. Bruno, Bacon, and Descartes, in order to 
make mankind the gift of experimental method, had to 
build upon the ruins of the merely logical system of 
Scholasticism. Kepler, Galileo, Newton, before elaborat- 
ing their system of celestial mechanism, had to disprove 
theories held for centuries. Darwin and his school could 
-not have conceived the stupendous law of biological 
evolution without undermining natural and theological 
beliefs which were a part of the intellectual patrimony 
of mankind. 

The modern atomic, hydrogenic and electro-dynamic 
theories, with regard to the constitution of matter, could 
not have been formulated without setting aside Aris- 
totelian and Scholastic views. For long periods of time 
we have been speaking of matter and form; now we 


(11) 


12 / Introduction 


think of the cosmos in terms of matter and energy. For 
centuries we thought of the various organic beings as 
having originated by the direct acts of a creative princi- 
ple; now the great majority of men of science hold a 
primordial proto-plasmic cell to have been the principle 
which has gradually evolved itself, from the lower 
grades of life, to the highest organic and spiritual forms. 


Yet human thought, in its triumphal march, has been 
unable to attack successfully the fundamental truth of 
the existence of God and its logical corollary, the 
Immortality of the soul. These two truths have stood 
like gigantic rocks, against which the waves of an 
insufficient knowledge have beaten in vain. The doc- 
trine of Immortality has come out of the attacks un- 
impaired, and, what is more, strengthened and invig- 
orated. Nowadays, during the first quarter of the proud 
century of lights, faith in Immortality is as strong and 
indomitable as it ever was. The growth of science, far 
from shaking this faith, has made the reality of the 
Infinite more evident, the mystery of the universe more 
august, the influence of the supernatural deeper and 
vaster, the affirmation of Immortality more positive. 


Faith in Immortality seems to be something necessary, 
indispensible. Reason demonstrates it. The will de- 
mands it. The heart hungers for it. 


I] 


There are, however, different views of Immortality. 
There is a conception of real Immortality, and one of 
what is but a shadow of Immortality. 


The desire of surviving the grave and perpetuating 
ourselves in the memory of posterity, this longing of 
ours to live as a moral and spiritual power in the world, 
seems to be only a faint echo of true Immortality. The 





Introduction 13 


“Non omnis moriar” of Horace, and Cicero’s eagerness 
to see the fame of his name not limited to time, but “cum 
omni posteritate adaequandam,” beautiful as they sound, 
appear to be but dim reflections of Immortality. 

The conception of Immortality, based on our human 
instinct for duration and perpetuity, is easily proved to 
be inadequate. It is maintained that in the empirical 
“ego” of each man, and all men, nature, life and race, 
with all their present powers long for the “more,” for 
intensity and duration, the two measures of being. 
The “ego” wants to increase itself, take more vigorously 
possession of its own world, and stretch itself into the 
future. 

Of this tendency toward being and “more’’being and 
continuity in being, the act of self-consciousness, wherein 
human personality resides, is the translation and the 
symbol. And since every man, because of his aptitude 
for an indefinite multiplicity of forms, tends to be not 
only a champion, but also a compend of the species, it 
is obvious that the instinct of perpetuity affirms itself 
in him, under the aspect of a thirst for Immortality and 
a faith in the same. 

Yet, this desired Immortality, which is a form of 
man’s self-knowledge and the expression of his most 
intimate instincts, is to be ascribed, if ever, to universal 
humanity, and not to the individual. It is known, indeed, 
how humanity attains historically its scope not through 
the duration of individual men (who enjoy only a brief 
cycle of life, grow old and perish), but through the 
multiplication of the individuals and the transmission of 
the acquisitions which they gradually make. 


Til 


No less incomplete is the conception of Immortality 
entertained by the Hegelian Benedetto Croce, who, in 


14 Introduction 


his “Critica” (p. 154) writes: “Even philosophy affirms 
ultra-earthly and super-individual Immortality by dem- 
onstrating that each act of ours, as soon as completed, 
detaches itself from us and lives an immortal life. We 
ourselves, who, really, are nothing but the process of our 
acts, are immortal, for to have lived is to live always.” 
This “minimum” of Immortality, which the Italian 
thinker establishes and demonstrates philosophically, 
borders almost on the annihilation of Immortality, since 
the very subject of it is done away with, and, in such a 
precise way both the beginning and the end are as- 
signed of that process which is the empirical “ego”. 


IV 


Nor can Immortality be equivalent to the merely 
ethical conception of the “conservation of value,” con- 
sisting in the persistence of the essential and the real. 


Hoffding, Myers and others apply Immortality to 
things which the universe has gained, things which, once 
acquired, it cannot let go. The higher attributes of 
existence, knowledge, love, beauty, artistic achievement, 
unselfish affection, sacrifice, joy, all that may be gen- 
eralized as “good” and worth-keeping, cannot finally 
perish. They endure henceforth and forever as part of 
the eternal Being of God. 


Such a conception of Immortality appears intrinsically 
deficient. The actions of man are supposed to live; 
but the personality of man is lost. All that is great 
and beautiful lives; those who accomplish it, perish. 
The very soul of Immortality is here wanting. Man 
lives in posterity as a beneficient influence; his teaching 
is a power for good; his example is a factor of human_ 
progress and an ideal inspiration for uplift; but man 
does not feel and know it. 


Introduction 15 


Moreover, this man’s participation in the struggles 
for the progress of the race does not include the con- 
scious sharing of man’s soul in the final triumph of 
moral and social perfection. Can it be Immortality? 


V 


Immortality has been also proved by the eternity of 
nature. What is what we call nature but an aspect of 
the divine Being? If what was at the beginning is now 
and ever shall be, world without end, it follows that 
durability and permanence become attributes of nature. 
To state that nature is an aspect of the Deity is ex- 
plicitly to postulate eternity for every existing thing, 
and to conclude that what we call death is not annihila- 
tion, but only a change. 

No really existing thing dies, but only changes its 
form. Physical science teaches us this, very clearly, 
concerning matter and energy. Not only physical and 
chemical forces are correlated among themselves, but 
also life-force is transmutable to, and derivable from, 
them. Therefore everything in nature is immortal. 


Is there anything more apparently transitory than a 
dew-drop, formed by atmospheric humidity? In the 
morning it glistens on the grass; the sun comes up, and, 
under its action, it goes, apparently, into nothingness. 
Its perceptible existence was only momentary. It has 
vanished almost as soon as it was born. 

Yet we know that it is not dead altogether. As a 
drop it was born, and as a drop it dies; but it lives as 
aqueous vapor. It persists with all those properties 
which will enable it to condense once more, a hundred 
times, indefinitely, into cloud or drop. Even the little 
drop, then, possesses the attribute of Immortality! 


The same is true of every particle of natural, living 


16 Introduction 


substances. Such substances, groupings, arrangements, 
systems are apt to break into their constituent elements 
and cease to cohere in an organized aggregate. We 
may call this disintegration, or breaking up of an as- 
semblage, or destruction. Yet the essence, the intrinsic 
reality, the soul of things, is permanent. Nothing dies! 

So, then, what about life? Can the particles of carbon, 
hydrogen and oxygen, which shaped themselves into the 
form of a tree, or a beast or man, vanish into a nonen- 
tity. Can it become something which is really nothing? 

Not so. Nor can it be so with intellect, will and mem- 
ory, nor with love and genius, nor with all the manifold 
activities which at present act and express themselves 
through matter. They cannot cease to be. They did 
not arise with man. They are, and will ever be, as 
eternal as God Himself. How mysterious is this unity 
of life running through the universe! What an awiul 
thing is this kinship between the human and the divine ! 


VI 


However, the Immortality which science attributes to 
nature is not the one which we claim for the soul of 
man. The former resolves itself into the indestruct- 
ibility of matter and force. It is a pantheistic absorption 
of man’s life in the universal life. It is the losing of 
ourselves into a soulless permanence of nature. 


Man’s Immortality possesses more determined and 
specific characteristics. It is a “personal” Immortality. 
It includes essentially the permanence of individuality. 
It is the survival of man’s conscious personality over the 
life of the body. It is the creature’s conscious commun- 
ion, in an eternal life, with its Creator. 


Immortality has been proved from the almost uni- 
versal, belief in some form of it, beginning from the 


Introduction 17 


earlier animistic cults down to the highly developed 
philosophical system of Kant. 

Others have demonstrated Immortality by the instinct- 
ive consciousness of mankind with regard to the ethical 
incompleteness of actual existence, demanding a com- 
pletion in a future existence. 

Others have employed the juridical argument, deduced 
from the anomalies of present life, exacting a correc- 
tion in a world to come. 

Laying aside these, and many other analogous, argu- 
ments, which are not lacking, indeed, in persuasive 
strength, we shall consider only those whose character 
is more strictly scientific. 


Will my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights? 

Must my day be dark by reason, O ye Heavens, of your boundless 
nights, 

Rush of Suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites? 


iam 
Bg Oolid Py Tt 
Bie ub) tik A 





CHAPTER I 


EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY 


“A fire-mist and a planet, 

A crystal and a cell, 

A jelly-fish and a saurian, 

And caves where cave-men dwell; 
Then a sense of law and beauty, 
And a face turned from the clod.” 


I 


All objections advanced against the belief in Immor- 
tality can be reduced to these three: 1. Man isa product 
of nature, and, consequently, he cannot claim exemp- 
tion from the universal law of evolution and dissolution ; 
2. Spirit depends on matter, and, therefore, when the 
latter disintegrates it carries with itself the perishing 
of the former; 3. Thought is a function of the brain, 
which means that the spiritual transcendence of the 
soul is a groundless claim. 

The first of these statements brings us face to face 
with evolution, the most significant of all scientific 
truths. Evolution is no longer a theory. It is the most 
evident of all doctrines. It is the foundation of all 
natural and biological laws. Darwin’s revelation far 
surpasses, in its significance, the discovery of the cos- 
mological laws by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. 

Evolution is the fundamental purpose of nature. Na- 
ture does not make men or things. She grows and 
develops them. She evolves man from a spermatozoic 
cell, through nine months of gestation in the womb. 
She grows her trees out of acorns, her chickens out 
of eggs. 


19 


20 Immortality 


Evolution is written on every page of the great book 
of Nature. It is a magnificent revelation written on 
the granite of the mountains and the wings of the butter- 
flies, on the waters of the ocean and the vapours floating 
in the air, on the flames of the nebulae and the splendours 
flashing out from the pupil of the human eye. Evolution 
isias much God’s revelation as that contained in the Bible. 

Everything in the world is evolution. Religion, civil- 
ization, progress are growths out of superstition, bar- 
barism and a relative stasis. 


Evolution has affected not only the physical, but even 
the metaphysical world. Metaphysics which was once 
founded on the immobility of the absolute Being, is now 
based on the movement and the eternal “becoming” of 
the Being. Psychology is no longer description or dem- 
onstration, as Aristotle and Plato conceived it, but a true 
drama. It is the dramatic history of the Spirit in the 
world. 


II 


The principles on which evolution is based are abso- 
lutely incontrovertible. Nobody could deny the fact that 
life-forces are transmutable into, and derivable from, 
physical and chemical forces. Embryology is positive 
in its teaching with regard to the structural unity of 
plants and animals, which calls, necessarily, for their 
origin from one-celled form. Anatomy and physiology 
demonstrate that animals and men are similar, not only 
in physical structure, but also in physiological function, 
often bone for bone, muscle for muscle and nerve for 
nerve. 


What more? Physiology and psychology have proved, 


in a luminous way, that animals possess logical and 
emotional faculties, such as intelligence, memory, will, 


Evolution and Immortality 21 


passions, etc., and that these faculties are evolved from 
inorganic matter. Psychology evidences also the fact 
that there is much in common between the mental 
processes of animal and man. 


These and other scientific facts and phenomena ex- 
_ plained, correlated and harmonized into a Brat biological 
system are what we call evolution. 


The evolutionary scale, resting on force and matter, 
and reaching to the highest intellectual and volitive 
forms, is composed of the following steps: 1. elements; 
2. chemical compounds; 3. vegetable life; 4. animal life; 
5. rational, spiritual, moral and immortal life. The 
physical and chemical forces of nature develop into the 
lower forms of life-forces; these, in turn, evolve into the 
“anima” or intelligent principle of animals; the “anima” 
gradually perfects itself to the extent of becoming the 
self-conscious spirit of man. 


Animal life, represented by the 4th step, though de- 
rived from the vegetable, it is a higher form of life- 
force, producing the phenomena of sensation, intellt- 
gence and will. The forces of phenomena characteristic 
of the 5th step, i.e. self-consciousness, reason, free will, 
spirituality and Immortality are derived from the pre- 
ceding stage, yet they represent a new and still higher 
plane of life. 

Thus our interpretation of evolution, which is that of 
Joseph Le Conte, the illustrious geologist of the Uni- 
versity of California, has two essential features, the first 
of which consists in holding the forces of nature as 
different forms of the one omnipresent divine energy. 
God’s self-conscious Spirit is outside of nature and inside 
of it. It transcends matter and yet is immanent in it. 

Is this pantheism? By no means. The description 
of the great drama of life-origins, as found in Genesis, 


22 . Immortality 


tells us that when the earth was as yet without form 
and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep 
“the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” 
(Gen. 1.: 2). This second verse of the first chapter of 
Genesis has for us an immense significance. It makes 
us realize that what we call physical and chemical 
forces of nature is only a different name for the Spirit 
of God working in nature. To say that the elements 
develop into chemical compounds, and that these, in their 
turn, produce vegetable life which gradually evolves into 
animal life is to say that the divine Spirit takes on, suc- 
cessively, higher and higher forms, in the course of 
cosmic time. 


The other essential feature in our doctrine of evolution 
is the appearance of new, unexpected and unimaginable 
properties and powers, coincident with every new de- 
velopment of the universal energy into higher planes. 
Every climbing from one step to the other, in the scale 
of life, is a veritable new birth. 


True, the preceding lower form is the subject matter 
of the next higher development; yet, at the moment 
the higher step is reached, something new appears, 
something whose life and manifestations are absolutely 
in excess of the intrinsic potentialities of the lower grade 
of existence. 


All this implies that, all the way, throughout the 
evolutive process of life, the Spirit is constantly at work. 
This means that man, his body as well as his mind and 
soul may very well be the product of matter, yet not 
of matter alone, not of matter left to itself, but of 
matter as guided, controlled and moved by the conscious 
divine energy. 


Evolution and Immortality 23 


III 


The means by which this upward movement is real- 
ized are a gradual passage from diffusion to concentra- 
tion, from extension to intension, from generalization to 
specification. It is essentially a process of “individuali- 
zation” not only of matter, but also of force. 

By increasing individualization the universal Spirit 
moves, in its upward development, toward more com- 
plete and perfect forms of life. In the first step of the 
life-scale (the step of physical and chemical force) this 
divine energy is in a generalized condition, diffused, 
unindividualized, pervading all nature. This step cor- 
responds to the first two days of the creation according 
to the Genesis (v:1-10), when God created the formless 
and void substance, which evolved into the light, firma- 
ment and sea. 


The same energy, which, in its progressive ascension 
to higher forms, individualizes matter, but, as yet, very 
imperfectly, becomes what we call the life-force of 
plants, i.e., vegetation. It is the work accomplished 
during the 3rd day (v. 11-13). 


The same energy, more intensely individuating mat- 
ter, and itself more intensely individuated, yet not 
completely, not exhaustively, we call the “anima” or 
| living principle of the animals. The individuation of 
divine energy in the animal soul marks such a great 
stride toward completeness, that it foreshadows the 
spiritual soul of man. This work of the Spirit takes 
the Sth and part of the 6th day (v. 20-25), 


Finally, still the same energy, completely individuated 
as a “separate entity”, and therefore self-conscious and 
immortal we call the spirit of man. This crowning 
of God’s creative work takes the rest of the 5th and the 
Oth day (v. 26 and foll.). 


24 Immortality 


Thus, in our view, the vital principle of plants, the 
animal soul and the spirit of man are but different stages, 
in the womb of nature, of that Spirit which “moved 
pon the face of the waters.” It is due to the action 
of the Spirit, working in nature, that matter, at first 
formless and lifeless, acquires gradually shape, light 
and life. : 

This same Spirit which, at the very beginning, by its 
moving upon the face of the waters, formed firmament, 
sea and dry land, now brings out also grass, plants, the 
great sea-whales, the beasts of the earth and man. 

Truly, then, man was made out of “the dust of the 
ground,” since the intermediate forms, from which he 
was developed, were an evolution of matter. 


IV 


However, the development of man’s spiritual mind | 
from the animal soul is not entirely analogous to the 
latter’s development from vegetable life. There is, in 
the evolution of man’s soul, something more, greater, 
higher, which, in the scale of life-development, places 
it in a unique relation. 


It is only in man that “Spirit comes to birth,” In 
elements and chemical compounds Spirit is in a diffused 
and shapeless state. “And the earth was without form 
and void” (Gen. 1. 2). In plants Spirit begins to shape 
itself, to form an embryo. In animals Spirit makes 
greater strides toward individuation and the possession 
of a life separated more and more from the universal 
life. It is quickened, indeed, but still incapable of inde- 
pendent existence. It is still in a physical connection. 
with nature. True, is no longer the embryo, but, rather, 
the fully developed organism; yet it is still gestated 


¢ 


Evolution and Immortality 25 


by mother nature. In brief, in the animal soul, Spirit 
is still unconscious of self, | 

In man, at last, Spirit separates itself from nature, 
grows capable of independent life, is born into a new 
and higher plane of existence. Nature is no longer the 
gestative, but only the “nursing” mother of the Spirit. 

This gestative method of the creation of the Spirit is a 
most fundamental and significant fact in the evolution 
of life. Without it, the whole geological history of the 
earth becomes absolutely meaningless. If man’s soul 
was to be made at once out of hand, why all this elab- 
orate preparation by evolution of the organic kingdom? 

Existence and life brought about by child-birth is, in 
many ways, a true illustration of the results of Spirit- 
birth. The embryo, no matter how fully developed and 
mature for individuation it may be, must, in order to 
enter the higher relation of manhood, sever its umbilical 
connection with the mother. Even so Spirit, in order 
to enter into the higher relation of God’s sonship, must 
break away from physical connection with the forces of 
nature and exist as an individual, a person, a self-con- 
sciousness. 

Again. Child-birth marks a sudden and complete 
change in the whole plan of the child’s existence and life. 
What formerly lived as a part of the mother, now lives 
as a totality of existence. What was only in a “mediate” 
state of existence, now is an immediate entity. What 
was a flesh of the flesh, bone of the bone and sou] of 
the soul is now a body and a spirit of none else but self. 
What was dependent on the mother for its whole exist- 
ence, now is in full possession of his own physical and 
psychical capacities. The child, after his birth into the 
world, is a “new creature.” 

So it is with the origin of man. The moment he 
becomes capable of separate, independent, spiritual exist- 


26 Immortality 


ence there is a complete change in the plane of psychical 
life. A new creature appears in the world, with entirely 
different capacities from those of the animal soul. Ani- 
mal rudimentary intelligence, will and consciousness 
become human reason, free-will, self-consciousness. 
What, in animals, was spirit only as a promise, a 
shadow, an embryo, becomes spirit as a fulfillment, a 
substance, a child. The creature of God becomes a self- 
conscious and immortal “child” of God. 


V 


Is all this consistent with Immortality as conceived 
by Christian conscience? Emphatically so. In evolu- 
tion, thus conceived, there is place for God. God orig- 
inates it; God presides over it. 


Creation, in a true sense, is beyond the domain of 
evolution. The latter implies logically and necessarily 
the former. Evolution presupposes structure and func- 
tion, though ever so small, to be evolved, modified, 
adapted. Evolution supposes the pre-existence of mat- 
ter, force and motion and their laws. Something has 
never been known to have been produced from nothing: 
Ex nihilo, nihil.” No person or thing has ever created a 
grain of new matter. 


Evolution asserts that all life, including man’s, sprang 
from a blurred, undetermined feeling in some proto- 
plasmic cell, which answered to a single nervous pulsa- 
tion or shock. From this shock consciousness developed, 
and, next, by a number of rapid successions of such feel- 
ings and shocks, sensations were born, these sensations 
srowing more vivid and complex until the dawn of 
mental life. 


But this theory does not account for the creation of 
the first protoplasmic cell nor of the first nervous shock. 


Evolution and Immortality 27 


The first germ of life, the primitive bit of proto-plasm 
could not arise by spontaneous generation. Without 
the pre-existence of matter to be evolved, there is no 
evolution. “Give me matter and motion,” said Des- 
cartes, “and I will make the world.” 

The world is said to have arrived at life, mind and 
consciousness by the play of natural forces acting on 
the complexities of highly developed molecular aggre- 
gates, at first life-cells, and, ultimately, brains. In the 
mechanism of evolution conscious life is viewed as 
conditioned by the physical, organic, and, more espec- 
ially, nervous processes. 

Still, behind and above the mechanism of evolution, 
there is something more important and essential, its 
originating and guiding principle. There is, there must 
be, something more than the action of physical and 
chemical factors. A self-conscious Power and Will, out- 
side of, and yet immanent in, matter, must have given 
the first impress to the nascent universe. There has 
evidently been, all through the process of evolution, an 
infinite Power, working, by natural laws, in and through, 
matter, mind and spirit. There has been a directive 
force through it all, which has controlled and led life- 
forms along definite paths. There has been a divine 
Spirit, acting through the medium of law, but with 
intelligence and love behind the law. What we call 
“natural laws” are the mode of working of that Spirit. 

All our effective movements are inspired by thought. 
Accordingly, we cannot help thinking that there must 
be some Intelligence immanent in all the processes of 
nature, for they are not random or purposeless, but 
organized and beautiful. It is God’s “mens” that “agi- 
tat molem!”’ 

The ingenuous faith of an infant race saw in the 
created world the effect of a divine “command”. Our 


28 Immortality 


maturer science sees in it the work of divine “law” 
and “order”. | 

Evolution is, thus, a process in which God is the 
impelling force, the controlling factor, the very heart 
and soul. In evolution God is everywhere and every- 
thing. There are, we are told, a thousand millions of 
electrons in a single atom. God is in each of these 
infinitesimal particles. He controls all and each of their 
arrangements, motions and activities. 


In the vision vouchsafed to him, Jacob saw God stand- 
ing on the top of the heaven-reaching ladder. In the 
more wonderful view of the evolution of life one sees 
God not only on the top, but at the bottom and on every 
step of the ladder. The Psalmist sees in the heavens 
a declaration of God’s glory. The evolutionist beholds 
the glorious power of God reflected on everything, on 
the heavens above, on the earth beneath and on the 
water under the earth. 

The giant oak-tree which erects itself to the skies 
and the moss and fern which we tread under our feet; 
the complexly structured mammal and the protozoan, 
invisible to the naked eye; the earth-clinging mollusk 
and the soaring eagle; the dog, the bee, the monkey, 
with their highly developed intelligence, and the coral, 
the sea-anemone, the jelly-fish and other similar inver- 
tebrates, whose biological features are scarcely higher 
than those of the plants; above all man, that unique 
epitome of the great world and the living image of the 
Godhead—all mingle their distinct voices in a triumphal 
chorus of praise to God’s eternal Spirit. 


VI 


Once we admit this first impulse and this co-operating 
action of God, religion has no longer reason to distrust 


Evolution and Immortality 29 


evolution. It is not beyond God’s infinite power to 
evolve consciousness, spirituality and Immortality from 
the lower forms of life. Evolution, originated and con- 
trolled by God, can, and does, explain not only the 
physical, but also the psychical nature of man. God’s 
power, evolving itself in nature, can account for Immor- 
tality, and even more. 


Who will deny that this is not reconcilable with re- 
ligion? If all the new powers which appear with every 
new form of life are but manifestations of the one, 
absolute, and infinite power of God, can we refuse to 
admit that Immortality also may be one of these powers 
or manifestations? If evolution is, after all, naught 
but the development of the Spirit in the womb of nature, 
dare we find it absurd that also man’s soul, with its 
spirituality and Immortality, is subject to the universal 
law of that development? 


A soul which, instead of being mechanically and ex- 
ternally infused into human organism, develops under 
the action of the Spirit, its own spirituality and Immor- 
tality is it necessarily less spiritual and immortal? 


Vil 


If this conception of the origin of man’s Immortality 
does not detract from the intrinsic reality of that awful 
prerogative of his, it does not even derogate, in the least, 
from the greatness and infinite wisdom of the Creator. 


The God of orthodox theology has to recur to distinct 
acts of creation. He is bound to operate several times, 
in order to bring about the various forms of life. In 
such succession of distinct creative acts the fact that 
every living creature, and man himself, was made out of 
“the dust of the ground” becomes quite meaningless. If 
God brings about the various life-forms by distinct 


30 Immortality 


acts, why not create them “ex nihilo,” instead of de- 
pending on matter? 

The God of evolution creates the first life-cell and 
endows it with the potentiality of an infinite develop- 
ment. The traditional God, on the contrary, in creating 
matter and force, endows them with such limited poten- 
tialities that they cannot develop themselves without 
His further actual intervention. Which of these two 
conceptions makes for a greater God? 

Is not the anti-evolutionary idea of creation a limita- 
tion of God’s omnipotence? Does it not involve a partial 
and imperfect manifestation of God? The God who has 
to employ his creative act several times is He not less 
mighty than the one who acts once for all? 

“If God appears periodically,” says rightly Henry 
Drummond,” he disappears periodically. If he comes 
upon the scene at special crises, he is absent from the 
scene in the intervals. Whether is all-God or occasional 
God, an immanent power or a casual wonder-worker, 
the nobler theory? 

Indeed the development of a spiritual and immortal 
soul from matter immeasurably enhances our concep- 
tion of God’s greatness. Is there, in this world of ours, 
anything more wonderful than the tiny single-celled 
ovum, from which the human organism is developed? 
The process by which the fertilized cell develops miriads 
of other cells, which gradually differentiate into tissues, 
bones, muscles, nerves and organs; the way these organs, 
from their rudimentary condition, grow into that most 
complex of all structures, the brain; the mysterious 
influence that enables the new organism to reproduce 
not only the physical traits of the parents, but, in vary- 
ing degree, their psychical characteristics:— all these 


Evolution and Immortality 31 


are phenomena which fill one with amazement. What 
tremendous potentialities were enclosed in that micro- 
scopic life-cell! 

The first God-created atom, which, under the control 
of the Creator, develops the protoplasmic cell, and, 
successively, the higher forms of life up to spiritual 
personality, must have enclosed the promise of even 
greater potentialities. Think of this! The cosmical 
energy of the world, with its unity, variety and harmony; 
the organic kingdom with its striking manifestations 
and operations; the immortal life of the soul with its 
transcending light, genius, love, ideals: all this from 
a protoplasmic cell! The creative splendours of the 
mind, the restless craving of the heart for the Absolute: 
from a complex of physico-chemical actions and reac- 
tions! Soul from dust! Spirit from matter! Harmony 
from chaos! Wings from the clod! Immortality from 
caducity! Such a sublime reality from so vile a mate- 
rial! Such a glorious consummation from so humble a 
beginning! Truly our God is a great God! Truly the 
God of evolution is able out of stones to raise up 
children unto Abraham! Truly evolution, like the lens 
of a colossal telescope, enormously magnifies before 
our amazed and ecstatic spirit the image of the Creator! 


VIll 


Evolution, thus interpreted, is becoming cieiee not only 
as Power, but as Wisdom. 

It is part of God’s universal wisdom to employ, in the 
production of an effect, no more power than is strictly 
needed. In the language of the Schoolmen God “non 
deest in necessariis, non abundat in superfluis.” So- 
briety is one of the most conspicuous characteristics of 
nature, God’s handmaid. 


Ue Immortality 


There is no useless multiplication in the laws of nature. 
One single law will answer for two or more cosmic 
and biological purposes. Thus, for instance, the uni- 
versal law of gravitation has been shown by Hyatt to 
be the primitive morphogenetic factor in the develop- 
ment of animal life. Thus, again, the action of the 
same agents, such as gravity, electricity, light, etc., 
which shaped the cosmic life of the world, is the basis 
of all physiological phenomena, as of motion in animals. 
Yet again, gravity determines, to a great extent, the 
form of shells. Light exercises a marked influence on 
the growth of plants. Variations in the pressure of air, 
electricity and other physical agents greatly influence 
vegetal and animal life. 

Evidently, superabundance and wastefulness are for- 
eign to nature’s workings; they must be also foreign 
to the nature’s Lord. If matter and force, combining 
into chemical energies, can develop into the organic 
life of the plant, why should God disregard what He has 
already at hand, and use a greater amount of His power 
in a direct and independent creation of vegetal life? 
The same question may be asked with regard to the 
whole scale of life. If one life-form can be the starting- 
point for the evolution of a superior one, we may be 
quite sure that God’s infinite wisdom will use and 
develop it. 


A God who does not use the laws of nature and the 
qualities of matter to develop His creation, is an un- 
wise God. Physical laws and chemical forces, which 
exert no influence on creation, have no reason to exist. 
Nothing could be more inconsistent than the conception 
of a God who furnishes matter with striking properties 
and potentialities, and then, in His work utterly disre- 
gards them. 


Evolution and Immortality 33 


The Scholastic “natura non facit saltus” could of no 
thing be truer than of the evolutive process of life. 
Nature and its Maker do not work by leaps. There is an 
harmonious correlation between the various stages of 
their manifestations. There is a link between one life- 
form and the other. The succeeding depends on the 
preceding; the superior presupposes the inferior. 

An omnipresent and ever-active Spirit, continuously 
working in Nature (“And the Spirit of God moved upon 
the face of the waters”), and a development of life-forms 
by actual interventions of the Creator, acting by inter- 
rupted leaps, include a contradiction and an absurdity. 


XI 


The evolutionary process of life and Immortality is, 
further, demanded on the ground of harmonization of 
apparent discrepancies. 


There seems to be an inconsistency between the “Let 
the EARTH bring forth the living creature” (Gen. I. 
24), and the “Let US make man” (Gen. I. 26). The 
“God CREATED man” (I. 27) seems to contradict the 
“And the Lord formed man OF THE DUST OF THE 
GROUND” (II. 7). Again. The statement in the 103rd 
Psalm (v. 14): “For He knoweth our frame; He remem- 
bereth that we are dust” seems not to be easily recon- 
cilable with the “Ye are gods” of Psalm 82nd, (v. 6). 

All these seeming discrepancies find in evolution a 
point of conciliation, In the light of evolutionary doc- 
trine we understand that all these apparently contra- 
dicting statements are true, since we know that it is 
under the concomitant action of the Spirit that the earth 
brings forth the living creature. On one hand the earth 
alone, without the Spirit, does not produce life. On 
the other hand the Spirit does not, miraculously, produce 


34 Immortality 


life “ex nihilo”. He uses, in the production of life, all 
the intrinsic properties and latent potentialities of pre- 
existing matter. 


x 


Finally evolution does not, in the least, belittle our 
conception of Immortality, this most divine of all the 
prerogatives of the soul. In evolution, rightly inter- 
preted, man is not considered a mere complex of cells. 
He is, on the contrary, a product of psychic force, ' 
modeled by a creative idea. Man is born of nature, 
yet he belongs to a higher nature. Man comes from 
the earth, but he is not of the earth. He treads the 
earth with his feet, but he scans the heavens with his 
eyes. Man is dust, but a dust shadowed by the Eternal, 
an abject dust which reflects the magnificence of the 
spheres. Man is clod, but a clod fired by a divine spark. 
Immortality is not so much the product of matter as of 
the Spirit working in matter. 

If God does not, in a determined moment, and by a 
mechanical action, infuse into man an immortal spirit, 
He puts in the first life-cell an awful germ, which, under 
His intelligent and loving control, will develop, blossom 
and fructify into Immortality. Can there be any con- 
ception of Immortality worthier of both God and man? 

Nothing, therefore, could be more wrong than looking 
upon evolution as something degrading man. The first 
life-cell is no lower than the Biblical “dust of the earth.” 
Is it any more degrading to hold that man was made 
indirectly from dust, through a long line of animal 
ancestors, than to believe that he was made directly from 
dust? Do not the dog and the monkey and the ape 
belong to higher orders of existence than does the clod? 


Evolution and Immortality 35 


So long as God is the Creative Power, what difference 
does it make whether out of the dust, by sudden fiat, 
or out of the dust by evolutive process, God brought 
man into being? So long as man is truly immortal 
what does it matter whether by direct immission, or 
by evolution of the lower animal soul, Immortality came 
to him? 

What does it matter if the wonderful tree of humanity 
is, at the root, one with inert and lifeless physical reality, 
and, at its lower stem, identical with the brute, since, 
on its higher shoots, bloom the divine blossoms of truth, 
love and beauty? What does it matter if the process 
begins with an amorphous and chaotic substance, if it 
issues in the soul of a Paul of Tarsus, an Augustine of 
Hippo, a Francis of Assisi? The fact that man had to 
go through the state of the monstrous pterodactyls is 
it, can it be, of importance, when his ascension had 
its climax in the genius of a Dante, a Da Vinci, a 
Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven, a Goethe, 
a Leopardi? 

Evolution, by going farther beyond the sudden fram- 
ing of man out of the Biblical dust of the earth, and 
tracing his origin to the very first nebulous matter, 
entrusts the sublime work of preparing the birth of 
man’s immortal spirit to millions of centuries, to all the 
forces of nature, to a most bewildering complex of 
actions and reactions on the part of myriads of living 
beings. Thus man becomes the central point of the 
universe, the apex of creation. He appears as the 
splendid result of the lengthy co-operation of earth 
and heaven. He is the precious gold, marveliously elab- 
orated and refined, throughout immeasurable aeons, in 
the fire of Life. He is the flower of the life of the world. 
He is a divine microcosm. 


36 Immortality 


XI 


More than this, Evolution promises to our species, 
in the name of the same law which formed it out of 
primeval matter, an endless ascension toward the Infinite. 

St. Paul saw human creatures perpetually moving 
toward higher and higher planes of perfection, liberty 
and glory:” but we are all changed into the same image 
from glory into: glory” (II. Cor. ch. 3. v. 18). The sub- 
lime Pauline vision finds its fulfillment in evolution. In 
no better way could, perhaps, evolution be defined than 
by stating that it is the gradual realization of spiritual 
personality. 

Indeed, the whole process of physical and psychical 
world, from the nebular and steamy matter of the 
primeval stage up through the uni-cellular organisms, 
through invertebrate and saurian and bird and mammal 
to man is the ascent of life towards higher, more creative 
and spiritual personality. 

There was no trace of the nervous system in the 
lowest organisms. Then came simple nervous ganglia 
and fibres, with corresponding simple feeling. Then 
appeared a central brain-mass, whose more complex 
reactions were indicative of dawning perception. Then 
came into existence the marvelously active brain of man, 
which reacted to the stimuli of the environment and 
became the instrument of creative imagination, thought 
and moral feeling. Thus spiritual personality appears 
as the sweet flower of a lengthy germination. 

The phenomenon of physical death does not, cannot, 
arrest the march of creative and spiritual life. Death 
is but a critical phase in the steady progress of the 
spirit. The spiritual values inherent in man survive 
physical disintegration. Human personality goes on, 


Evolution and Immortality 37 


realizing its potencies more completely, living its life 
more fully. 

Thus from cosmic matter comes the natural or physi- 
cal man; the physical man grows into the meta-physical 
or supernatural man. Primordial elements, physical 
order, organic life, spiritual and immortal personality— 
what a wonderful sequence! From the electron to the 
soul of man—what an awful drama! 

The star-dust was not the terminus of the electron. 
In the stupendous order of creative ascent the complex 
atomic energies were the stage of the higher vital ener- 
gies. Actual man, accordingly, cannot exhaust his po- 
tentialities, nor does he fully realize his evolutive powers, 
here on earth. 

Man has the promise of further advance, newer en- 
richments, more sublime perfectibility. The poet, the 
artist, the hero are not the last step in man’s evolution. 
Actual spiritual energies must be the starting-point for 
the ascent toward unimaginably higher and more har- 
monious forms of life. From man shall come the “super- 
man”, the spiritual man, resulting from the union of the 
individual spirit with the Spirit of the Whole. The 
human being shall grow into the divinized being:”’ ye 
are gods” (Ps. 82, v. 6). In the light of evolution the 
actual man appears, therefore, as the raw material of 
the man that is to be. 

That marvelous process which began with the prim- 
ordial germ, is still going on, on the spiritual plane. 
It will continue to function as long as, in the language 
of St. John, “it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” 
Spiritual evolution is bound to continue, until the time 
shall come when, as St. Paul puts it, “that which is in 
part shall be done away, and that which is perfect is to 
come.” 


38 Immortality 


The transformation of the natural and earthly man 
into the supernatural and heavenly man: here is the 
stupendous climax of evolution! 


“And so it is written: the first man Adam was made 
a living soul; the last Adam a quickening Spirit” (I. 
Cor. XV. 45). 


Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape 

From the lower world within him, moods of tiger or of ape? 
Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Ages of ages, 
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape ? 


All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade, 
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, 
Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker. “It is finished. Man is made.” 


CHAPTER II 
BODY, SPIRIT AND IMMORTALITY 


“The death of the body may indeed be the end of the sensational use 
of our mind, but only the beginning of the intellectual use.’ E. Kant. 


I 


Among the structural elements of human organism the 
nervous system is doubtless the most important. The 
centre of the nervous system is the brain. The tissues, 
of which it is made, have the property of “irritability” 
or sensitiveness to external influences. Their function 
is to mediate between the outer world and the inner, 
and to convey to the muscles and other organs “motor” 
impulses, so as to bring about movements harmonious 
and advantageous to the organism. 

The brain is thus the mysterious “medium” between 
the physical world and the psychical. It is the organ 
or instrument of the mind. It is here that the material 
activities, underlying consciousness, intellect, emotions 
and will, take place. Whatever functions are carried 
on by the rest of the nervous system enter into con- 
sciousness only through the brain. It is only by means 
of the brain that the stimulations of sensory nerves 
result in a consciousness of the stimulations (“sensa- 
tion”), and the knowledge of, and control over, the 
resulting motion. 

The brain would seem to be essential to any con- 
scious elaboration. All the so-called higher mental ac- 
tivities, thought and will, seem entirely dependent upon 
it. Destroy the “sensory-motor area” of the “cere- 


39 


40 Immortality 


brum”, injure its frontal lobes: you destroy, at the 
same time, the conscious apprehension of sound, vision, 
smell, etc. By making sensation impossible, you do 
away with the possibility of intellectual activity. The 
latter depends on the former. 

The labours of prominent physiologists, among whom 
Golgi, His, Kolliker, Gehuchten, Forel, Cajal, Retzsius, 
Ferrier, Lenhossek, Flourens, Wegent, Nissl, Erlich, etc. 
have given us an insight into the structure of the nervous 
system. The “neuron” theory is now the generally 
accepted one. Its champions tell us that the structural 
element of the nervous tissues is the neuron, made up of 
a “nerve-cell” and its branches. 

The cell-body consists of a mass of proto-plasm, con- 
taining as a nucleus, the nerve-cell. The cell-body is the 
birth or genetic centre of the neuron. 


But the physiological significance of the different 
parts of the neuron seems to escape human analysis. 
Our ideas are based largely on theoretical grounds. 
Thus the result of the patient analysis of the brain is 
analogous to that of nature and life as a whole. Man 
is able to notice and examine the “phenomenon”; but he 
is helpless with regard to the underlying “noumenon”. 
Ultimate reality is incomprehensible. 


II 


However the brain, no matter how wonderful a phys- 
iological reality it is, and may prove to be through 
further investigation, cannot be a producer of thought. 


The agnostic argument that we, not knowing all the 
powers of the brain, cannot exclude the possibility of 
its being the productive cause of reasoning intelligence, 
is pseudo-scientific. Granting that we do not know all 
the brain can do, yet we do know what it cannot do. 


Body, Spirit and Immortality 41 


The great logical principle: “operari sequitur esse” 
_applies also to the relation of thought to the brain. If 
thought transcends, in its essence, the brain, the former 
cannot be an adequate effect of the latter. 


Does reasoning intelligence transcend the brain? Em- 
phatically so. The transcendence is as infinitely great 
as that of Spirit over matter. The brain is a mass of 
tissues, a molecular aggregate, a bit of matter with all 
its properties of extension, volume, weight, etc. Thought 
is an intrinsically immaterial and spiritual reality. 


True, thought depends on the brain for its existence, 
yet the nature and attributes of the former exceed the 
essential properties of the latter. The power of know]l- 
edge, reflexion, and, above all, self-consciousness, pos- 
sessed by the soul, is intrinsically immaterial. It cannot 
be an attribute of extended substance. 


Again, the brain is a physiological organ. Its func- 
tions are limited to perceptions and sensations. Thought, 
on the contrary, is an act of the psyche, and, conse- 
quently, a real fact of deep psychological significance. 
The brain’s activities are limited by the physical world. 
Mind’s power of abstraction, by which man makes broad 
generalizations, formulates conceptions of cause, effect, 
time, space, etc., and sees concrete individual objects 
in their ideal relations, is essentially metaphysical. The 
dependence of that metaphysical power on the physical 
reality cannot destroy its transcendental character. 


Thus it is safe to conclude that the brain can no more 
be the producer of thought than matter of spirit. In 
this infinite universe of ours, constituted, as spectral 
analysis shows, of essentially the same substance, there 
is no trace of a single astronomical body that has pro- 
duced a reasoning intelligence. 


/ 


42 Immortality 


Moreover mind studies matter and analyzes the brain 
itself. It is, therefore, greater than matter and the | 
brain. Surely a mind, whose light penetrates the mys- 
terious recesses of the brain, and endeavors to under- 
stand its structure and functions, must be greater than 
the object of its knowledge. 

The brain, in spite of its latent physiological powers 
and its essential relationship to psychological reality, 
cannot generate reason and personality. Though we 
can act on the external world only through our muscles, 
yet in ourselves we are aware that such things as 
thought, will, consciousness, responsibility, purpose, love 
etc., belong to a totally different category, with which 
our organs and their tissues appear to have nothing to do. 


Our mental faculties and activities seem intimately 
associated with our bodily mechanism and are displayed 
through it; but, in themselves, they belong to a different 
order of being, an order which employs and dominates 
the material, while immersed, or immanent, in it. 


Til 


The transcendency of thought over the brain, and of 
the soul over the body, is further testified by the triple 
fact that man distinguishes himself from his body; he 
is conscious of personal identity throughout the bodily 
changes, and, in the exercises of his will, he is not con- 
trolled by, but rather controls, the body. 


That man distinguishes himself from his body is a 
psychological experience so obvious and universal as to 
hardly need demonstration. Christ once affirmed that 
the body is more than raiment, and the life more than 
meat. (St. Matt. VI. 28). Likewise man feels that his 
individuality, his “ego”, is more than his bodily organism. 
The Christian martyr who says to the pagan emperor: 


Body, Spirit and Immortality 43 


“You can kill my body, but not my soul” knows that he 
is something more than muscles, bones and nerves. 
The apostle of science, social progress and moral per- 
fection, who sacrifices the exigencies of his bodily and 
material life to the triumph of his ideal, knows that he 
is superior to mere living and organized substance. 
Every one of those millions of allied soldiers, who, 
during the World War, exposed themselves to death and 
destruction, so that justice, freedom and democracy 
might not perish for ever, knew that his personality, 
which moved the body and inspired it with the heroism 
of self-sacrifice, was something greater than the body 
itself. His conscious sacrifice was a solemn witness to 
the reality of Spirit and its transcendence over matter. 


IV 


Also the personal identity of man belongs to the cate- 
gory of universal psychological experience. 

Science teaches us that the molecular aggregates of 
bodily organism are undergoing a continuous process of 
transformation and renewal, with the result that, after 
a certain period of time, there is, in man, hardly any- 
thing left of the material substance of the previous 
stages of life. Many times, in the course of life, the 
entire body is worn off and recreated. Dead tissues and 
cells are replaced by new tissues and cells. A veritable 
Egyptian Phoenix, man’s body repeatedly dies and rises 
from its own ashes. 

Yet, in spite of all this ceaseless changing, there is, 
in man, something that does not change. In spite of 
the subjection of his organism to succession, plurality 
and diversity of experience, there persists in him a psy- 
chological unity. Man is aware of an intrinsic self- 
sameness and identity. 


44 Immortality 


This personal identity, which is the very basis of 
consciousness, has a deep spiritual significance. It means 
that the principle which, through changes, does not 
change, possesses a character of absoluteness. This 
amounts to saying that man partakes of the infinite 
reality, and that the destiny of the soul is not uncon- 
ditionally bound to that of the body. If personality can 
withstand all the changes and shocks of life, it is not ab- 
surd to think that it can also survive the more radical 
change and greater shock of death. If the central self 
of man is not affected by the ceaseless flux and reflux 
of the external organism, and, through the steady flowing 
away of the body, retains the fulness of its essence and 
powers, it is reasonable to argue that, in death, it can 
entirely and finally disengage itself from the flesh, 
without ceasing to be and to live. If more than once, 
in this life, the psyche of man can put off its worn body 
and put on a new flesh, it must be able to clothe itself 
in a new after-death garment, adapted to its new 
condition. 


V 


Further that man’s will is not controlled by the body 
is easily demonstrable on the same ground of psycho- 
logical experience. ) 

It is, of course, out of our scope to expound and 
analyze the theory of volition, its genesis, its progress, 
its characteristics of freedom, the psycho-physical inter- 
dependence, and other deep metaphysical questions. We 
are only to notice that, since volition depends on intel- 
lection (“nihil volitum quin praecognitum”), and intel- 
lection, in its turn, depends on sensation (“nihil est in 
intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu”) there is, 


Body, Spirit and Immortality 45 


consequently, an essential relation between will, mind 
and the bodily senses. 

Will, however, is not a faculty distinct from the mind. 
‘It is, rather, that function of the mind which manifests 
itself in action. It is the active side of man’s con- 
sciousness. 


As the phenomenon of intellection, though depending, 
in its genesis, on the material world of sensation, yet, 
as a result of its going through psychical elaboration, 
becomes a purely spiritual affair, so volition, influenced, 
as it is, by physical factors, undergoes such a psycho- 
logical process that it becomes, in its ultimate reality, 
a pure act of the soul. 


In the complex process of volition one of the surest 
things is this: man is essentially independent of external 
influences. Volition includes fundamentally a “choice”, 
which would be impossible if man were not in a relation 
of independence and autonomy to the alternatives which 
appeal to him. 

Man is conscious that, behind the more or less strong 
appeals of the various, and often, conflicting, motives, 
he is weighing these motives, and coming to a decision. 
upon their relative value to him. In brief, man knows 
that he is not the controlled, but the controller. 

The whole history of the moral and social progress 
of the world is based upon this controlling power of 
man, in the active field of mind. The exterior world 
and the senses may influence and entice him; yet the 
sway, the control, the mastery of his own actions remain, 
after all, with him. Often the flesh will resist the 
spiritual dictates; yet man can find in himself the power 
to subject it. The spiritual perfection of mankind is the 
result of a great and heroic effort to subordinate matter 
to spirit, the body to the soul, the world to God. 


46 Immortality 


The whole of which tends to demonstrate that the 
relation of the material organism to mental and spiritual 
life is not absolute. Man’s personality is an intrinsically 
spiritual principle, which depends only accidentally on 
the body. The spiritual function of personality is not 
necessarily bound to cease with the disintegration of its 
material involucrum. 


Vi 


Nothing could be more erroneous than to hold that 
the brain is the effective cause of thought. 

In order to be justified in asserting that the brain 
is a producer of thought, one ought to demonstrate that 
the former controls and dominates the latter in such a 
way that abstraction, idealization and genius are physi- 
ological processes. This cannot be proved. We are, 
therefore, right in maintaining that as life-cells are not 
the very essence of life, so brain-cells do not constitute 
the reality of mind. 


Thought is only a “transmittive” function of the 
brain. The fact that the brain transmits thought does 
not include that it produces thought. An “instrumental” 
cause is something different from an “efficient” cause. 


Thought does need the brain for its organ of expres- 
sion; yet this need is not so absolute as to exclude the 
possibility of a state in which the former may be no 
longer so dependent on the latter. “When”, William 
James beautifully says, “the physiologist pronounces 
the phrase: Thought is a function of the brain: he thinks 
of the matter just as he thinks when he says: Steam is 
a function of the teakettle.” 

Again. The brain is only a “condition” of thought. 
The term “condition” excludes absoluteness of relation. 
The brain modifies, limits the existence and character 


————=— ~~ a 


ea es 


Body, Spirit and Immortality 47 


of thought, yet it is not the constitutive principle of its 
reality. Therefore it is “actually”, but not “absolutely” 
impossible to think without the brain. 


The brain is to thinking what the house is to seeing. 
To use M’ Taggart’s similitude:” If a man is shut up 
in a house, the transparency of the windows is an essen- 
tial condition of his seeing the sky. But it would not 
be prudent to infer that, if he walked out of the house, 
he could not see the sky, because there was no longer 
any glass through which he might see.” 


The brain’s material is, consequently, the “normal”, 
but not the “exclusive” medium through which mental 
activity can express itself. It is not absurd to conceive 
that mind, and spirit may operate without an inter- 
mediary physical process. Individuality is essentially 
dependent upon the brain for physical manifestation, but 
only accidentally for psychical existence. 


Vil 


That the connection of man’s spiritual element with 
the material is not absolute is also evidenced by the fact 
that the relation between the organism and mental life 
is far from being uniform. The “mens sana in corpore 
sano” seems to be not peremptorily true. Recent invest- 
igations by specialists in physio-psychology tend to show 
that in certain cases of intellectual insanity (apparently 
based on false perception) there was no error of the 
sensorial process, central or peripheral. 

There are facts that show the independence of man’s 
mind, operating with great clearness, precision and 
strength even in wholly abnormal physical conditions. 
It has been discovered, for instance, that there are very 
close relations between genius and neuropathy. Dis- 
tinguished psychiatrists, among whom are the Italian 


48 Immortality 


Morselli and Colella, affirm that Caesar, Lucretius, Mo- 
hammed, Tasso, Napoleon, Byron, Lenau, Victor Hugo 
and Leopardi were, more or less, affected in their nerv- 
ous system. Some of them were epileptics, such being 
the case of Victor Hugo, who wrote several of his most 
splendid pages after strong epileptic paroxisms. 

The most significant phenomenon, in this connection, 
is presented by Giacomo Leopardi, doubtless the greatest 
lyrist of modern times. Dante’s powerful “synthesis” 
and Leopardi’s clear “intuition” have not yet been sur- 
passed by any other giant of the realm of letters. 


Yet this inexhaustible reservoir of mental power, this 
miracle of genius which we call “Leopardi” is found em- 
bodied in a most delicate and frail natural constitution. 
Leopardi’s physique was early impaired by an incurable 
visceral and nervous infirmity. Gradually intense study, 
want of love, loss of hopes, gloomy melancholy and cruel 
pessimism so hopelessly shattered that sickly organism 
that Leopardi lost the use of some of his senses and be- 
came, as he himself says: “a trunk that feels and suffers.” 

However the physical torments of the body and the 
unique martyrdom of the soul, far from impairing Leo- 
pardi’s mental energy, seemed rather to heighten it. 
His depth of feeling, his clearness of ideas, his direct- 
ness of expression, in brief, the vitality of his genius 
grew in proportion. to the increasing abnormality of his 
physical condition. It was when a “physical wreck” that 
he wrote some on his “Canzoni” with which neither the 
literature of Greece and Rome, nor that of modern 
Europe, has anything to compare. 

How to explain all this? One might answer that the 
general pathological condition of Leopardi’s organism 
did not affect the centre of his nervous system. But 
such supposition strikes one as being highly improbable. 


Body, Spirit and Immortality 49 
Vill 


The doctrine that mental life can exist independently 
of a body is strengthened by an experience of ordinary 
life. 

It is a fact that our life exhibits to us a constant 
waning of the lower faculties of mere sense-perception, 
of mere mechanical memory and of fancy, with a cor- 
responding increase of the higher faculty of reasoning 
intelligence. Hence the lower activities may be said 
to perish in proportion as the higher activities are on 
the increase. 

The child depends, almost exclusively, on the world 
of sensations; but, as he grows, physically and intel- 
lectually, his dependence on the exterior world decreases 
more and more, while the spiritual faculties of abstrac- 
tion, generalization, interior reflection become supreme. 
_ Mechanical memory weakens in proportion to the in- 
crease of the dialectic power of reasoning. A young 
boy memorizes much more quickly than the student of 
maturer age. In the latter the susceptibility and readi- 
ness of the earlier period give place to retentiveness. 

Again, the educated man, the thinker, depends on the 
exterior world much less than the uncultured and ignor- 
ant. The former is able to create to himself an inner 
world, in which to live. The controlling factor in his 
mental activities is not immediate sense-perception, but 
the idea and the associations of ideas. 


IX 


This waning of the sensible world, proportionate to 
the intensifying of the intellectual, is testified by the 
phenomenon called “genius”. 

Never does man live a more intense intellectual life 
than when he is under the inspiration of genius. He 


50 Immortality 


has then a more direct and immediate intuition of the 
true and the beautiful. 

Dante tells us that his Beatrice is not a product of 
nature and a reality belonging to the sensible world. 
She is, rather, an “intellectual light, full of love.” 

Leonardo da Vinci, the most universal mind the world 
has ever produced, divined the principle that art is 
“creation” rather than pure “imitation” of nature. 

The divine Michelangelo, the most genuine spiritual 
heir of Dante, wrote, in one of his letters, that one paints 
“with the brain,’ and not with the eyes and hands alone. 

These principles, applied to practice, created those 
artistic masterpieces, before which one almost hesitates 
to believe that they are the works of men. ! 

Musical genius confirms the fact that the highest 
creations of genius are emanations of beings living the 
minimum of the sensible world and the maximum of the 
ultra-sensible. If the world does not possess, in the 
realm of sounds, anything diviner than Beethoven’s 
Symphonies, it is due to the fact that the musician of 
Bonn is, par excellence, the artist of the interior and 
spiritual reality. His music aims at incarnating and 
expressing the idea. 

His tendency to liberate himself from matter grows 
stronger as deafness detaches him, more and more, from 
the outward world. This aspiration to immaterial reality, 
this struggle of genius to compel matter to obedience, 
borders, in some of his latest compositions, on morbidity. 
Then Beethoven, through gigantic struggles and tragic 
contrasts, reaches absolute and immaterial contempla- 
tion, wherein cares and anxieties become silent, and 
the feeling of supreme reconciliation sweetens life. | 

Thus genius makes it clear that man’s life grows 


Body, Spirit and Immortality 51 


more intense and higher when he depends less on mate- 
rial world, that he is more “himself” when he is less the 
exterior reality. 


Xx 


This leads us to ask a question. That gradual waning 
of the lower faculties in man, proportionate to the 
intensification of his higher activities, could it not reach, 
by death, the point of total extinction without neces- 
sarily destroying, or impairing, the reality of man’s 
personality? Could not the soul, through the disinte- 
gration of the human organism, lose completely sensible 
perception, fancy, mechanical memory, and still keep the 
fullness of its consciousness? Could not, in a world 
to come, man’s personality connect itself with the past 
and be aware of its own identity? 

If the “self” of man, the less it depends on the senses, 
the more it is “himself”, would it not be infinitely height- 
ened by a total and absolute independence on sense- 
perception? If dependence on the bodily organism 
makes life more limited and fragmentary, would not 
independence from matter make it fuller and more abso- 
lute? If our ethical and spiritual life is more real when 
we silence the exigencies of sensual life, and almost 
annihilate the material world, shall we affirm that will, 
after bodily disintegration, is unable to exercise its 
activity? 


XI 


This is not all. There is a mass of psychical phe- 
nomena, which the laws of nature, actually known, are 
unable to explain. The scientists, baffled by these facts, 
are compelled either to admit the existence of a spirit- 
world, or to find refuge in agnosticism. 


52 Immortality 


One of these phenomena is telepathy, or the trans- 
ference of thought from one mind to another, without 
visible means by which the act of transferring is accom- 
plished. In the undeveloped power of telepathy we 
have an indication of a mode of mental and spiritual 
intercourse apparently not dependent on the machinery 
of physical processes. 

The range of telepathic activity is so wide as to 
include not only thought-transference, but many other 
phenomena which appear to us very strange and almost 
miraculous. It has been ascertained, for instance, that 
one can, by exerting one’s will to that effect, cause one’s 
self to appear present to a person at a distance. 


Much of the evidence for this and analogous phenom- 


ena (attested in the “Proceedings of the Society for 


Psychical Research”) is fragmentary; but the mass of 
telepathic facts is decidedly imposing. All the experi- 
ments, taken in the aggregate, appear to make it un- 


reasonable to doubt any longer the existence, in man, 


of a psychical principle, which can act independently 
of the ordinarily recognized channels of sense. 

Telepathy, and so also “clairvoyance”, point strongly 
to the existence of a psychical activity which depends 
very little, if at all, on the physical, transcends the body, 
and is, consequently, capable of surviving it. This psy- 
chical activity is unable to work, directly, on the physical 
world; but it can, and must be, the contrary, in its own 
metaphysical sphere. 

Telepathy is not the only stage on the road to scientific 
proof. There is a mass of physiological, psychical and 
pathological facts which point to the actual persistence 
of personality apart from a bodily vehicle. True, spirit- 


XIT 


a 


Body, Spirit and Immortality 53 


ualistic facts are not generally known and not universally 
accepted as yet. Their theory is still in a rudimentary 
stage. Professional fraud has discredited them consider- 
ably. Yet, there is something, in them, that has all 
the appearance of being true. 

One cannot reasonably and conscientiously reject an 
evidence which is vouched by such scientists as the Eng- 
lish Crookes, Myers, Lodge, Barret, Ruskin, Wallace, 
Conan Doyle, the French Flourcroy, Richet, Bergson, 
Janet, Flammarion, Maxwel, Geley, the Italian Lom- 
broso, Morselli, Schiapparelli, Lapponi, the American 
Hare, James, Sargent, the Russian Atsakoff, etc. 

The testimony of these naturalists, psychologists and 
anthropologists, based on the most scrupulous scientific 
investigations, affords to us evidence of psychical enti- 
ties, constructing a temporary organ of materialization, 
and making attempts at manifestation through the same. 
There is a mass of unquestionable scientific witness to 
the actual communication between the dead and the 
living. ; 

Other arguments from what is called “automatism”, 
from “subliminal faculty”, and mental pathology in gen- 
eral seem also to point to the fact that psychical reality is 
distinguished from the physical, and that, under certain 
conditions, the former can absorb the latter to the extent 
of being almost able to act without it. | 

Cesare Lombroso, the great Italian founder of modern 
criminal anthropology, wrote thus: “I have made it the 
most tenacious occupation of my life to prove that all 
force is a property of matter, and the soul an emanation 
of the brain.” Yet, in a posthumous work of his, the 
eminent scientist affirmed, to the great scandal of the 
materialistic school: “There are psychical phenomena 
which find no explanation in science.” (See: “Nuova 
Antologia”. July, 1922). 


54 Immortality 


XITt 


These recent discoveries, in the realm of psychical 
science, have an enormous significance. They are the 
scientific affirmation of the spirit-world, taught by 
religion. They have confirmed Descartes’ emphatic 
statement that the existence of a spiritual principle, 
distinct from the body, is more certain than the existence 
of the body itself. 


Psychical discoveries teach us that the Spirit, which, 
in the beginning, created and shaped matter, still controls 
it. They emphasize the fact that present life waits for 
its completion in the life of the world to come. They 
tell us that growth in spirituality is the inevitable road 
which each soul is destined to follow. 


Thus, if natural science has discovered the unity and 
identity of substance, the unity of force and the unity 
of origin, psychical science has made the greater dis- 
covery of the unity of life in the One Supreme Mind 
and Spirit. 

This indestructible spiritual unity and identity of life 
is the equivalent of Immortality. 


Just in the farther bound of sense 
Unproved by outward evidence, 

But known by a deep influence 

Which through our grosser clay doth shine 
With light unwaning and divine, 

Beyond where highest thought can fly, 
Stretched the world of Mystery, 

And they not greatly overween 

Who deem that nothing true hath been 
Save the unspeakable Unseen. 


CHAPTER III 
SPIRITUAL TRANSCENDENCE OF THE SOUL 


I 


Before passing to our fundamental proof of Immor- 
tality, it is necessary to emphasize the spiritual trans- 
cendence of the human soul. This transcendence has 
been the direct mark for all the objections advanced 
against Immortality by materialistic science. Clearing 
the ground from adverse arguments, and affirming the 
intrinsic spirituality of the soul will be, as it were, laying 
deeper foundations for the constructive reason of the 
proof. 

Death has been defined as a breaking of the consti- 
tutive elements of a substance, and a disintegration of 
parts. Evidently death, as such, can affect man as an 
essential compound of body and soul, but not the soul 
itself. The soul is an immaterial entity, a spirit. It 
cannot be subject to alteration or disintegration. 

What is a spirit? We do not know what it is; but we 
do know what it is not. We know that we cannot think 
of it in terms of matter. Inertia, size, shape, elasticity, 
weight, volume and other attributes of matter are 
foreign to the spirit. 

We are unable to conceive the simplest component of 
matter, 1. e. the molecule, or the hydrogenic atom, or 
the radio-active electron, without relating them to mass 
and weight. The soul on the contrary, is a real, simple, 
and unitary being, sharply opposed to material substance 
as thought is opposed to extension. The soul does not 


95 


56 Immortality 


move between limits. It is, rather than a substance, an 
active principle or an activity. 

We do not know things by their “noumena” or hidden 
essence. We know them only by their “phenomena” or 
external manifestations. The philosophical axiom: “ope- 
rari sequitur esse” is as evident as the mathematical 
truth that one plus one makes two. 

This incontrovertible principle that the actions of a 
being are specifically consentaneous and proportionate to 
its nature, applies to all forms of life, including the very 
highest ones. Tell us what the phenomena of the soul 
are, and we will tell you what the soul is. 

The soul’s most characteristic operations are reason 
and free will; these are intrinsically spiritual manifesta- 
tions; the soul is, consequently, an essentially spiritual 
reality. 

Reasoning is an inalienable attribute of man. It is 
something as natural and necessary to him as air, food 
and motion. Man, in the most primitive and savage 
state, lives by a rudimentary process of thought. The 
child, as soon as his organism has reached a certain 
degree of development, shows that he is a thinking being. 
An irresistible, instinctive power leads him to touch, feel, 
and learn the names of things. With the years, his mind 
grows more and more independent of concrete objects, 
shows more general aptitude, engages itself in more 
spiritual processes, while it becomes the master of the 
external world and the controlling principle of life. 


II 


To consider the functions of mind, to analyze the pre- 
rogatives of thought, is to assert spirituality for each 
one of them. 


Spiritual Transcendence of the Soul 37 


First of all, thought possesses the power of abstrac- 
tion. In the visible world we find individual, concrete 
beings and modes. We see man, but none has ever seen 
“humanity.” We meet a good man, but none has ever 
seen “goodness.” 

What the eyes do not see, mind does see. Mind, by 
putting together the various acts of goodness which are 
seen in men, and comparing them, perceives goodness in 
its general essence. Mind conceives the reality that 
is common to the various objects, and forms the trans- 
cendental notion of the same. Goodness, as seen by 
mind, is no longer the moral quality of this or that man, 
It is the transcending goodness of all men. It is the 
ideal form of goodness. Mind has divested goodness 
from all that was concrete, individuating, fragmentary. 

Again. Objects strike man with their “accidents”, 
_that is, their contingent qualities and properties. Mind, 
on the contrary, conceives the “attributes” of things, 
that is what is necessarily and absolutely inherent in 
them. Thus, for instance, the immensity of the ocean 
will strike our eyes and imagination; yet mind realizes 
that quantity or volume is only an accident of the water, 
since one drop of it possesses the essential attributes 
of the whole mass. 

Yet again. The natural world presents to us the 
“phenomenon” or the fact, in a concrete and unrelated 
mode of existence. We do not find, in the objective 
world, such things as cause, effect, instrumentality, affin- 
ity, analogy, finality, etc. All these notions are the result 
of the work of mind, which strives to comprehend the 
“noumenon”, or deeper reality, underlying the external 
manifestations. Natural reality exists as partial; mind 
conceives it as a total, or final, fact. 

Mind, by comparing distinct beings, modes and facts 


58 Immortality 


to each other, and discovering in them analogies, gives 
us classifications and categories. 

Through careful observation of phenomena, mind is 
able to catch what is regular, normal, in the operations 
and workings of beings, and, indeed, of the whole uni- 
verse. The result is the formulation of laws. In brief, 
mind searches the absolute. 


It 


This process, by which mind abstracts from the con- 
crete, conceives ideas and notions, perceives relations 
and formulates laws, is essentially spiritual. Mind 
spiritualizes the material and concrete reality of the 
natural world. It is like the sun, which, in the glory 
of its midday’s rays, absorbs the cloud, invests it with. 
its splendours and transforms it into light. 


True, the process of assimilation, by which the physi- 
cal object becomes idea, is, at the beginning, a material 
one; yet, at the end, reveals itself as intrinsically spirit- 
ual. The external world “impresses” our senses, but. 
mind, by a physio-psychical reconstruction of the “per- 
ception”, forms, or creates, the purely spiritual “idea”. 


What is even more striking, mind can reproduce, with 
a more or less adequate image, objects not actually 
present to the senses. Thousands of miles may separate 
us from our parents, our native country and town, all 
the dearest objects associated with our youth; yet we 
can, in a moment, revive them in our mind, see them 
present to us in their real characteristics and ideal rela- 
tions, feel almost their loving breath and mighty charm. 
Thousands of years have run between us and the ancient 
Oriental, Greek and Roman worlds; yet which of us 
has not seen, with his imagination, the Egyptians build-. 
ing the Pyramids, and turning the Nile into a grand 


Spiritual Transcendence of the Soul 59 


canal? Who has not fancifully witnessed the heroic 
Greeks of the Thermopilae and heard the immortal 
song of Simonides? Who has not, while studying Roman 
history, spiritually visualized the Caesars moving, with 
their legions, to the conquest of the world, and exalted 
himself before the heroic figures and deeds of the 
Gracchi, of Cato, the Scipios, and of Cicero? 

All this cannot be the exclusive work of animal fancy 
and mechanical memory, since we revive ancient civiliza- 
tions, not only as a mere series of concrete facts, but as 
an ideal historical reality, with all its political, social, 
intellectual, moral, religious and spiritual relations. It 
is the result of the higher activity of intellectual imag- 
ination and memory. 


Furthermore, thought can elaborate a “complex” idea, 
which may not have any corresponding physical object, 
though its particular constituent elements may severally 
be the reproductions of actual perceptions. The idea 
of a “centaur” is a complex mental picture, composed 
of the objective ideas of man and horse. 


Thus the mental faculty of abstraction, which makes 
broad generalizations, formulates conceptions of time, 
space, cause, analogy, finality, etc., and states accurately 
and profoundly the laws of nature shows itself to be 
highly metaphysical. Before the divine power of mind 
we fully realize that man was truly made in the image 
of the All-Spirit God! 


IV 


This, however, does not exhaust mind’s resourceful- 
ness. Human intelligence is a creative faculty. Creat- 
iveness is indeed the characteristic of thought. 


James Harvey Robinson, in his: “Mind in the making” 
(Harper. 1922) suggests that we substitute for the word 


60 Immortality 


“reason” that of “creative thought”. For, he says, 
mental meditation begets knowledge and “knowledge is 
really creative, inasmuch as it makes things look differ- 
ent from what they seemed before.” 


According to this illustrious American thinker the 
Greeks, the Medievalists, and, above all, the naturalists 
of the 16th and 17th century were the champions of a 
creative movement, which was continued by modern 
philosophers and scientists. 

Mind’s creative power is conspicuously seen in what 
we call “genius”. Nature, even at its best, cannot explain 
the transcending manifestations of genius. This glow- 
ing intuition, on the part of few, of the inner reality 
is the spark of a spiritual fire burning within man. 
There is a divinity within us; when it is blown into 
flame man’s mind is exalted to heights of creativeness. 


“Est Deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.” (Ovid. 
Paste a Wileeo): 


Behold how, man, under the mighty impulse and flery 
light of inspiration, becomes a creator! Behold how 
he gives life to what does not exist in nature! Such 
creatures as Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarca’s Laura and the 
nameless woman of whom Leopardi sings in his immortal 
canzone “Alla sua donna” are, indeed, creations of beings 
who do not exist in this world of imperfection. 


Beatrice is essentially, as the poet says: 
“Intellectual light, full of love” 

What about Leopardi’s “donna”? Does she not trans- 
cend all human experience? The poet himself is aware 
of this, when he pathetically sings: “But there is no 
thing on earth that resembles thee.” With a deeper 
philosophical accent, in the last strophe, he asks her 
whether or not she is: “one of the eternal ideas.” 


Art, no less than literature, proclaims highly mind’s 


‘ 


Spiritual Transcendence of the Soul 61 


creative power. Some of Raffaello’s Madonnas, Da 


Vinci's Cenacle, and Michelangelo’s Moses can be desig- 
nated by no other name than creations. They are 
materializations of visions of eternal beauty, vouchsafed 
to the artists. They are spiritual emanations of the 
artists’ souls. Do not expect to see them in nature. 
They are representations of something immanent, and 
yet transcending nature, the divine. 


Cast your eye on Raffaello’s works. The 16th century 
was essentially a worldly and pagan age; yet the creative 
power of that great Italian genius gave us the “Madonna 
del Granduca,” which, in the purity of the forehead, the 
sweetness of the look and in the whole figure, humble 
and radiating, reveals something that is not of the earth, 
the perfume of Christian virginity. Our wonder in- 
creases at the contemplation of the “Madonna di San 
Sisto”. Before it, we feel, with Dante, that the virgin- 
mother is 

“Humble and high beyond all other creature.” 
It is, as Viardot affirmed, “a revelation of heaven, to the 
earth.” 

As for Da Vinci’s Cenacle no natural scene or situa- 
tion could have furnished the subject-matter for it. 
It is a group truer than truth itself. While the apostles, 
gathered around the Saviour, are movable as waves, 
Christ, in the centre, is as immovable as eternity. No 
human voice could possibly say, more eloquently, what 
the Saviour’s eyes and lips utter. You can feel the 
ineffable anguish, tempered by divine Charity and resig- 
nation, of the pathetic words: “One of you shall 
betray me.” ® 

The contrast between the serene, luminous goodness 
of Christ and the satanic maliciousness of Judas is a 
miracle. Judas’ head is a veritable portrait of betrayal 


62 Immortality 


and inhumanity. It seems as if all the betrayals, which 
have darkened the history of men, are concentrated on 
that head. | 

What about the Moses? Phidias might, perhaps, have 
seen, in nature, his “Jupiter”; but Michelangelo, the 
spiritual heir of Dante and the follower of Savonarola, 
could not have found, on earth, a prototype for his 
Moses. It is something greater than the world itself. 
It is a living and palpitating Colossus. Before it we 
feel, with Taine, that “should it get up, the world would 
ruin.” 


V 


The realm of sounds affirms, even more strongly, 
mind’s creativeness. Which of us, listening to one of 
Beethoven’s Symphonies, has not realized, somehow, that 
only a creator could have conceived so deep, sublime, 
transcending harmonies? 

The artist has, perhaps, stood long hours, in medita- 
tion and rapture, in the midst of canorous woods, or 
facing majestic mountain ranges, or wandering over the 
dreamy immensity of the sea. During clear and dewy 
spring dawns he has been absorbing, perchance, the eter- 
nal and invigorating youthfulness of nature. The golden 
glows of autumn sunsets, glorified by the dying songs 
of the winged creatures, may have thrown him into 
waves of tender emotion. The midsummer starry nights, 
with their softly diffused light, the murmur of the 
brooks, the rustling of the foliage, the buzzing of insects, 
and a thousand other indistinct voices have, most likely, 
lulled him by the sweet rhythm of their poetry. 


Yet, there is, in Beethoven’s Symphonies, something 
that is greater, more touching, more thrilling than all 
the combined voices of nature. The artist has been 


Spiritual Transcendence of the Soul 63 


sounding the bottomless depths of another world. He 
has been listening to the voices that sound, mysteriously, 
across the luminous horizons of the world-soul. 

The various, contrasting echoes which the external 
world has sent to the artist, have been, by him, elab- 
orated, perfected, idealized. As the ore has acquired its 
finish and splendour in the fire, even so the music, which 
nature conveyed to his hearing, has passed through the 
inflamed soul of the artist, to attain its universal, emo- 
tional and spiritual appeal. He has plunged the har- 
monies of the outer world into those of the inner world. 
He has bathed the sensations, which external objects 
have produced in his consciousness, in the light and 
beauty of spirit-reality. What has come out is something 
that ears had never heard before. 

With Beethoven music is no longer one of the arts. 
It becomes the universal art. It learns how to express 
the most intimate and indefinable sensations, thoughts 
and longings. It clothes with harmony all that which 
mind conceives and the soul feels, yet the mouth does 
not how to utter by words. 

Recall the riotus, intoxicating, bacchic gaiety of the 
IX Symphony’s scherzo. Think of the serene contem- 
plation of, and luminous, etherial aspiration to, the 
ideal, as expressed in the adagio. Reawaken the finale’s 
divine joyfulness, signifying the supreme reconciliation 
of life’s contrasting elements. Is not all that a creation? 


VI 


Man’s transcending genius is revealed also in science. 
Nature presents only facts; mind, by analyzing and 
correlating them, conceives universal laws, states doc- 
trines, formulates systems. 

Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and their planetary laws; 


64 ‘Immortality 


Huygens, Herschell, Laplace and their celestial me- 
chanics; Newton and his universal gravitation; Linnaeus 
and his classification of plants; Buffon and his description 
of natural history; Hatty and his fundamental princi- 
ples of mineralogy; Harvey, Malpighi, Jenner, Flourens, 
Bernard, Bichat, Galvani, Mesmer, Von Baer, Agassiz, 
Pasteur, Wirchow and their revelations in the anatomi- 
cal, physiological and biological field; Davy, Lavoisier, 
Leibig, Chevreul, Berthollet, Chaptal, Becquerel and their 
chemical and electro-chemical discoveries and applica- 
tions; Volta, Ampére, Arago, Faraday, Papin, Weber, 
Maxwell, Helmholtz, Fresnell, Thomson, Ruhmkoff, Sie- 
mens, Deprez and their findings in connection with the 
various branches of physics; Cuvier, Lyell and their 
principles of paleonthology and geology; Humboldt and 
Sausurre and their meteorologic and climatologic obser- 
vations; Lamarck, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Haeckel 
and their great formulation of biological law; Rumford 
and his theory of the correlation of forces; Wolff and his 
embryological doctrine; Dalton and his atomic theory; 
Hertz and his sonorous waves; Schwann and his cell- 
theory: what a great and sublime scientific epopee! 
Mind not only discovers the forces of nature, but 
conquers and subdues them, by putting them to the 
service of civilization. Roger Bacon and his gunpowder, 
Guttenberg and his printing press, Galileo and his tele- 
scope and pendulum, Torricelli and his barometer, Boyle 
and his pneumatic machine, Watt and Stephenson and 
their locomotive. Volta and his electric pile, Franklin 
and his lightning rod, Montgolfier and Guy Lussac and 
their air-balloon, Watt and his illuminating gas, Fulton 
and his steamship, Niepce and Daguerre and their pho- 
tography, Bushnell and his submarine, Morse and _ his 
telegraph, Thomson and his submarine cable, Siemens 
and his dynamo, Graham Bell and his telephone, Kirch- 


Spiritual Transcendence of the Soul 65 


hoff and Bunsen and their spectroscope, Edison and his 
electric lamp and phonograph, Réntgen and his X-rays, 
Lumiere and his cinema, Currie and the radium, Wright 
and the aeroplane, Marconi and the wireless telegraph, 
the present increasing wonders of the radio, all the 
modern hydraulic, steam and electric machines, whose 
complicatedness and mechanical perfection stupefy : what 
a glorious hymn to the inexhaustible inventiveness of 
man’s genius! 

Time’s relentless power cancels the most profound 
traces of civilization. In its ceaseless march it sows 
ruin and destruction; yet Liibbock, Winckelmann, Neib- 
hur, Mommsen, Ramsay, Lanciani, Champollion, Bunsen, 
Mariette, Curtius, Schlieman, Max Miiller, and other 
illustrious archeologists, anthropologists, philologists and 
historians have resuscitated ruins, revived dead civiliza- 
tions, made ancient history palpitate with life. 

What is even more wonderful, mind, not satisfied 
with having interrogated and explained the external 
world, has turned to itself and sounded the bottomless 
depths of its own psychical life. Plato, Aristotle, St. 
Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Bruno, Bacon, Des- 
cartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Spencer, 
William James, Bergson, Benedetto Croce are a few of 
the long train of heroes in man’s colossal struggle for 
the knowledge of himself. 

We are told, in the inspired book, that man is an inef- 
fable partaker of godhead. (St. John. X 34). The 
same book affirms, even more explicitly, that man is a 
god. (Ps. 82. v.: 6). Before the creative spark of 
man’s genius we feel the truthfulness of those state- 
ments in their widest and deepest significance. 

To say that man abstracts, generalizes, relates, co- 
ordinates, classifies, forms ideas and formulates laws is 
to say that he conceives the “absolute” and the “uni- 


66 Immortality 


versal”. Thus, man, who seems to be such a small thing 
in the vastness of creation, is, through his conception of 
the absolute, greater than all creation. A point in space 
contains him; yet he contains in himself all the world. 
Nature does not comprehend either the greatness of 
man or its own greatness. Man comprehends himself 
and the world. 


VII 


Mind’s metaphysical power does not limit itself to 
natural and intellectual reality. It extends to the ethical. 

Man has the idea of absolute moral value, of goodness, 
of spiritual beauty. This conception of an ethical world 
is purely a spiritual product. Justice and injustice, right 
and wrong, worth and demerit, duty, obligation, responsi- 
bility, moral sanction are relations of which there is 
no trace in the natural world. 

Man, besides conceiving moral reality, is able to live 
it. He possesses not only a mind, but a will. He is 
endowed with logical as well as emotional faculties. 
Love, kindness, sympathy, generosity, social obligation, 
forgiveness, denial or self, altruism as well as hatred, 
harshness, cruelty, misanthropy, selfishness, revenge are 
part of his life. 

He apprehends the good as something ennobling his 
own nature, and evil as debasing it. He sees in the 
good a reflection of God, the “Summum Bonum”. He 
realizes that evil is a negation of God’s infinite goodness 
and perfection. 

Moreover, man is a “free” volitive being. Reason 
discovers to him the intrinsic desirability of the good; 
yet he has the power of choosing evil. Mind depicts 
to him, more or less vividly, the inherent ugliness and 





Spiritual Transcendence of the Soul 67 


repulsiveness of evil; yet he can, if he wills, prefer 
evil to the good. 

No predetermining influence can affect his choice. 
He moves toward it spontaneously and voluntarily. The 
whole conception of “worth” rests on the freedom of 
man’s will. Unless he were free in his choice, he would 
be incapable of either merit or demerit. 

This freedom is a fact of infinite spiritual significance. 
The abstracting power of mind prevents man from being 
enslaved to concrete objects and enables him to wander 
throughout the luminous realms of transcending reality. 
Even so will’s freedom prevents man from being a slave 
in the moral domain. He is free; therefore he is the 
controller of his inclinations, appetites and passions. 
He is master and sovereign of his instincts, volitions 
and acts. 

The conscious process involved in effecting a decision, 
in the moral sphere, reveals man as an essentially spirit- 
ual being. Man has, in his intelligence, a spark of God’s 
mind. In his will he has a throbbing of God’s soul. 


Vill 


But do not animals also possess an intelligence? 
Are not animal’s processes of thought similar to those 
of man? Do not they possess emotional faculties? Are 
they not endowed with a will to give effect to these 
faculties? | 

Careful observations of animal life have not convinced 
us that experience can develop their logical and emo- 


tional powers to a remarkable degree? Does, after all, 


any greater mental difference exist between an ape and 


a Fiji Islander than between the latter and Dante, 


Michelangelo and Beethoven? Is it not true that only 
cultivation of intellect has given man his greater ability 


Ost Immortality 


of abstraction and generalization, and that his superior 
mental evolution is the result of a more persistent 
effort? Can we, then, logically attribute to man spirit- 
uality, without according it also to the rest of the 
animals ? 

Indeed we cannot deny that animals possess an intelli- 
gence and a will. Yet, if in all faculties possessed by 
man and animals the resemblance is great, the difference 
is immense. It is not only a matter of degree, but also 
of kind. In every case the relation between animal’s 
and man’s faculties is that of the shadow to the sub- 
stance, the promise to the fulfillment, the embryo to 
the child. 

Both in animal and man every mental state and mental 
change corresponds with a particular brain-state and 
brain-change. The physical and psychical series corres- 
pond with each other, term for term. But in animal 
and man the causal relation between mind and the brain, 
the physical and psychical element, are in an inversed 
order. 

In animals brain-changes are always the cause of 
psychical phenomena. On the contrary, in man’s higher 
activities psychical change precedes and determines: 
brain-change. Animal’s brain-changes are invariably de- 
termined by external impressions; in man alone they can 
be produced by internal impressions. 

Man alone can perceive properties and relations ab- 
stracted from the objects. He alone can perceive rela- 
tions not only between objects, but also between ideas. 
He can form not only “percepts”, but also “concepts”’. 
In man alone there is an inner world, a “microcosm”, 
the things or objects of which are ideas. The power 
of animal’s intelligence merely “reacts” as played upon 
by external nature; the conscious power of man’s spirit 
“acts” on the thing itself. 


Spiritual Transcendence of the Soul 69 


It is not denied here that, when we think, some 
special atomic motion may go on in the brain-cells; but 
this is merely an unconscious movement, of which there 
are many samples in bodily function. But when we di- 
rectly begin to attain to mental process, we leave the 
physical region as understood by us, and enter a more 
deeply mysterious region. We enter the awful domain 
of the psychical, the metaphysical, the supernatural, the 
spirit. We find, in the medullous cerebral recesses, a 
divine spark at work. 

Thus we may say that animals possess an intelligence, 
but not a reason. They possess feelings, emotions and 
memory; but they do not analyze, abstract and gen- 
eralize. The process of their mind is not syllogistic. 
Their mental activity is not exercised consciously. 

The same limitation is revealed in the animal's volitive 
process. Animal is endowed with a will, but not a free- 
will, An animal’s will is an instinctive rather than a 
reflex movement. Its volition is characterized by 
mechanism rather than by finalism. An animal acts 
under the influence of nature’s pre-determination. Its 
actions are not the result of a free decision. The po- 
tentiality and perfectibility of an animal's will are finite. 
In brief, an animal’s will is only a shadow of man’s will. 

Man’s intelligence develops itself to the heights of 
inventive and creative genius. Even so man’s will 
reaches the sublime perfection of self-sacrifice for the 
sake of God and the children of God. An animal’s 
instinctive love for his offspring may lead it to lay 
down its life; but only man is capable of giving up him- 
self for the moral and spiritual uplift of unknown, even 
inimical, men. Only in man love really proves itself 
to be stronger than death. _ 

In man alone the spiritual world is capable of affirming 


70 Inumortality 


itself over the material, to the degree of not only subor- 
dinating to itself, but of denying and annihilating it, also. 


IX 


This spiritual transcendence of man over animals is 
evidenced by other facts. 

An animal can express his feelings only through the 
rudimentary and inadequate form of a “sign-language”. 
Man, through his rational “grammatico-syntactical’”’ 
speech can give expression to the innermost feelings and 
thoughts. 

Again. There are animals which seem capable of a 
remarkably constructive art. The bee’s hive strikes us 
by the perfection of its structure. Yet the bee has, 
since its creation, always built its abode in the same way. 
It has never improved on it. It is only man’s art that is 
truly rational and progressive. What a bewildering 
progress from the dolmens and the huts of primitive men 
to the modern office-building and residential mansions 
of our cities! . 

The position itself of man’s body proclaims his spirit- 
ual superiority. All animals, none accepted, look down- 
ward. Their stooping position seems to affirm that they 
are from, and for, the earth. Man alone, in the whole 
creation, stands sublimely erect. He stands on the 
earth, but he looks up to heaven. He treads upon the 
earth’s surface, but his eyes and forehead wander 
throughout the luminous depths of the skies. He is 
from the earth, but not for the earth. 

Man is clothed with a material body, but he is also 
endowed with a spiritual soul. He is the product of the 
dust of the ground, but he is also an immortal image 
and likeness of God. 


Spiritual Transcendence of the Soul 71 


“What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? For 
Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and 
hast crowned him with glory and honour.” (Ps. VIII. 4-5). 


All that hath been mayjestical 

In life or death since time began 
Is native in the simple heart of all, 
The angel heart of man. 


Oh mighty brother-soul of man. 
Where’er thou art, in low or high, 
Thy skyey arches with exulting span 
O’er-roof infinity. 


All thoughts that mold age begin 

Deep down within the primitive soul, 
And from the many, slowly upward wing 
To One who grasps the whole. 


CHAPTER IV 


SELF-CONSCIOUS PERSONALITY 
AND 
IMMORTALITY 


I 


All the proofs brought forth so far have not solved 
the problem of man’s Immortality. 

That man, insofar as he is an intelligence and a will, 
is immortal, none is apt to deny. There is in human 
life something absolute and eternal, which space does 
not comprehend and time does not measure, something 
whose value is independent of personal feelings, inter- 
ests and vicissitudes. The reality which is neither mat- 
ter, nor space, nor time, but is, on the contrary, absolute- 
ness, consciousness, and apprehension of a transcending 
world, cannot die. 

If man is thought and will, he does not die. Man, 
or, better, what in man is thought and will, cannot 
perish. The dialectic process of thought, the synthesis 
of will are incommensurable with chemical and physio- 
logical processes, of which death is a moment. 

Death is a physical and organic phenomenon. To 
speak of the death of the spirit is to apply to it a category 
to which it rebels. It is like judging the beauty of a 
picture by the chemical composition of the colours, or 
measuring by a thermometer the degree of mental 
persuasion. 


If man were only spirit, thought and will, one would 


hip 


Self-Conscious Personality and Immortality 73 


immediately understand that the notion of death is for- 
eign and inapplicable to him. But man, the concrete 
man, is neither a spirit nor an organism alone. He is 
both. Therefore, in order to be able to tell whether or 
not man is immortal it is necessary to know what man 
is, how he is constituted, where the basis of human 
personality lies and what the content of the moral “ego” 
is. In other words it is necessary to prove that self- 
consciousness, personality, the “ego” does not die. 


To all appearances this “ego” does seem to perish. 
Behold a dying man, an adult, who has laboriously con- 
structed to himself a moral personality, a history of his 
own, unique and ineffable. Let us suppose that dying 
means the escaping of the individual, monad spirit from 
an organism which is extinguishing itself. 

The “ego” loses all the activities which were bound to 
the organism, detaches himself from all known things, 
from the earth, in which he grew, and his dear ones. 

The rhythm of his thoughts and feelings, measured 
by external objects, ceases. He is no longer fed by 
sensations or affected by newness of development. He 
becomes what? A thought of the thought. 

Memory, which was a slow selection and succession 
of fragmentary psychical states, becomes a simultaneous 
presence of all the heterogeneous sequence of those 
states and of past volitions. Will, an act of willed things 
to be either rejected or conquered, becomes what? A 
will of the universal will. 

What kind of life, we are asked, is this? What no- 
tions, what experiences shall we apply to it, in order to 
understand it?. If, even in the earthly life, personality 
is rapidly transformed by the change of the external 
background, what shall happen to man, when not only 
the background, but the very organ of contact with the 


74 Immortality 


same is totally suppressed? Shall we not say that a 
man, as a personality, dies? 

Emphatically no! He seems to die, but he does not. 
He cannot die. Thought and will return to the source 
and reservoir of the spirit, but not without their identi- 
fying and individuating characteristics. Man is im- 
mortal not only as a spirit, but as an individual spirit, 
a personality. 

Can personality die? If not, why? What is per- 
sonality? Is personality the intrinsic cause of Immor- 
tality, or is it dependent on something more simple and 
fundamental ? 


The answer to all this was partially given, when ex- 
pounding evolution. The upward movement by which 
the forces of nature develop gradually into higher forms 
of life is wholly by increasing “individuation”. 

In the organic scale we find an increasing individuation 
of bodily forms which completes itself, as a perfect 
organic individual, in the higher animal. Likewise, in the 
dynamic realm, force and energy (i.e., the Spirit moving, 
at first, upon the face of the waters) develops by a proc- 
ess of individuation, until it reaches completeness as a 
“spirit-individual”, or personality, in man. 

This individuation of Spirit in man imports the capa- 
bility, on the part of the same Spirit, of a separate 
existence, or the potentiality of existing as an entity 
separate from the universality of the being, and, conse- 
quently, self-conscious. It imports a breaking away of 
the Spirit from physical connection with the forces of 
nature. It means the severance of the Spirit-embryo 
from the womb of nature, and its birth into an inde- 
pendent life. 

This completed “Spirit-individuality” explains, as noth- 
ing else does, what is characteristic of man. It is this 


Self-Conscious Personality and Immortality 75 


which makes up personality or the self-acting “ego”. 
It is this which constitutes self-consciousness, reflective 
intelligence, and free moral will. 

Thus the appearance of self-consciousness among the 
psychical phenomena is connected with the very act of 
Spirit-birth. The moment the Spirit completely indiv- 
iduates itself in man, man becomes conscious of self, 
turns his thoughts upon himself and the mystery of his 
existence as separate and distinct from nature. That 
moment nature becomes a “person”; animality becomes 
“humanity”; it becomes “he”. At that moment come, 
with self-consciousness personality, reason, free will, 
capacity of apprehending God, the recognition of rela- 
tions to other beings, moral responsibility and Immor- 
tality. At that moment the seeds of religion, ethics, 
philosophy, science, letters, arts and progress are sown. 

Spirit-immortality appears like the stupendous climax 
of natural development. Through the whole geological 
history of the earth the Spirit is being gestated in the 
womb of nature. It is after a long embryonic develop- 
ment that it comes to birth, independent life, and _Immor- 
tality, in man. 

Nature has no meaning without this consummation. 
All evolution has its beginning, its course and its end. 
Without Spirit-immortality this cosmos, which has been 
developing into increasing beauty, for so many millions 
of years, would be lacking the last touch of perfection. 

Will then anyone wonder that personal Immortality 
is claimed for man? Why, could a spirit-individuality, 
or a personality, perish? Decidedly no. Existing as a 
separate entity, and, therefore, self-conscious, means 
being immortal. An independent spiritual life supposes 
and implies Immortality. Spirit-viability is Immortality, 

There is an intrinsic contradiction between these two 
terms: self-conscious and mortal. In order to be able 


76 Immortality 


to reflect upon nature and to think its laws a being must 
be severed from nature; if distinct from nature, he is 
not subject to its vicissitudes (of which death is one); 
if not under the control of nature, he is in possession of 
a full and complete spirit-life. This completeness of 
spirit-life means survival over bodily disintegration, 
intrinsic persistency, Immortality. 


IIl 


What are the attributes and manifestations of self- 
consciousness and personality? 

First of all, consciousness of self is the most dis- 
tinguishing mark of human nature, and the most 
intrinsically significant. Man not only is, but knows 
that he is. He not only knows, but he is aware of his 
knowing. He feels and knows that he is “himself”. 


Of all verbal ideas the “ego” is the simplest, and the - 
deepest. Of all phonetic utterances it is the most in- | 
stinctive and natural. It is the affirmation that man 
exists as a specific individual. It is the testifier of man’s 
personal identity. Man thinks his identity, and self- 
consciousness is the result. 


All the manifestations of man’s physical and psychical 
life reveal a personality. Mental life occurs in relation 
to a conscious self. Such things as self-respect, personal 
dignity, independence of character, moral responsibility, 
etc. can be conceived only in relation to a conscious 
personality. 

All our physical and mental differences, expressed in 
temperament, grade of intelligence, physiognomy, char- 
acteristic gestures, handwriting, literary style, and our 
moral tendencies, expressed in ideas, opinions, ideals, — 
inclinations, hopes: in brief, all the individual traits 
that differentiate the existence of a man from that of 


\ 


Self-Conscious Personality and Immortality 77 


the mass of men spring from consciousness of self. 
Conscious personality is the individuation, in man, of 
the general psychology of thought, feeling, and will. 

Secondly, self-consciousness is a “reflective” act. It 
means mental reaction upon things and self, appropria- 
tion of external and internal experiences, unity of such 
experiences, and a biographical “continuum”. Self-con- 
scious personality, however, is more than the sum of 
its experiences. | 

We may be reminded that there is also an animal 
consciousness. But we maintain that it belongs to an 
intrinsically lower order. It is characterized by a unity 
of physical, rather than psychical, experience. Animal 
experience lacks coherence, continuity, and, consequently, 
self-consciousness. 

The animal does not conceive its existence as separate 
from nature. It does not discriminate between itself 
and the outer world. It is not a unity complete in itself. 
It is “it”, not “he”. In brief, the animal is not self- 
conscious. 

Thirdly, it belongs to the very essence of personality 
to be “permanent”. If permanence is attributed to all 
intrinsic and constructive essence of things, it is claimed, 
a fortiori, for the self of man. Personality is the most 
essential of all realities, and, consequently, the most 
enduring. 

There is nothing in the world more consistent and 
real than that harmonious whole formed by intellect, 
memory, consciousness, and will. Personality dominates 
and transcends all temporal modes of expression, and so 
is essentially eternal wherever it exists. 

True, a higher animal, an insect, even a tree has a life 
of its own; but we cannot imagine them possessing 
consciousness and personality. They appear to be merely 
graded units in a world of being. Their life is essen- 


78 Immortality 


tially circumscribed by temporal modes of expression. 
They share in a general life, a life more or less developed, 
yet unidentified, unconscious, impersonal. They are still 
gestated in the womb of nature. Their permanence will, 
therefore, be necessarily characterized by impersonality. 


Not so the permanence of man’s soul. Man exists as 
a self-conscious being. He possesses an individual char- 
acteristic, a personality. With his physical organism 
not only physical life, but intellect, will and emotions 
are associated. These principles, faculties or activities 
have a real and undeniable existence. 

Genius, love, ideals and self-sacrifice strengthen, 
beautify, spiritualize human existence to such an extent 
that it is no longer a mere function of the material 
aggregate (in which, for a time, it is embodied, and 
through which it manifests itself), but belongs to a uni- 
verse of spirit, closely and mysteriously related to im- 
manent and, at once, transcendent Deity. Man rises to 
the attainments of God-like faculties. He becomes a 
living image of God. He realizes divinity in himself, he 
becomes a god.) Ps. 82. v.:6). What then? If all that 
is real is immortal, can there be doubt about the contin- 
uance of personality? 

Man may return, in some sense, to the absolute source 
of reality, but not without his individual character. 

Fourthly, personality is an “inalienable” attribute of 
man. Once the spirit-embryo, by birth, severs itself 
from the womb of nature and attains an independent 
existence, it cannot, by any means and under any circum- 
stances, return to former physical dependence. Once 
the capability of individual life is conquered, it can no. 
longer be lost. Individuality cannot be absorbed by 
universality. What was once identified, cannot become 
unidentified. “He” cannot revert to “it”. The great. 


Self-Conscious Personality and Immortality 79 


law of life is development, becoming. IJnvelopment and 
uncoming are the negation of life. 

An analogy may be drawn from the physical and 
psychical existence of man. Human organism lives and 
dies not as a part of a universal, unidentified bodily 
reality, but as a particular, individuated entity. If, by an 
hypothesis, the body could live eternally, it would live 
as an individual body. 

The same is true of spiritual reality. If, by an absurd 
supposition, the spirit of man could die, it would die 
as an individual spirit. 

Analogously, if the spirit survives bodily disintegra- 
tion, it must perpetuate itself as an individual spirit, 
as a personality. The “It-spirit” cannot be a continua- 
tion of the “He-spirit”’. 


LV. 


From the aforesaid it logically follows that the Im- 
mortality of the soul includes necessarily identity, unity, 
continuity of the conscious living being. Were the soul, 
after leaving the material organism, to lose its individ- 
uality, it would no longer be a continuity and a perma- 
nence of itself. It would be a different soul, not 
identically the same soul. 


This amounts to nothing less than a destruction of 
the soul. The loss of self-conscious personality would 
mean the spiritual death of the soul. It would, indeed, 
be the only kind of death of which the soul is capable. 

Moreover the hypothesis that the conscious “self” of 
man may return to the source of universal life unindiv- 
iduated, means the annihilation of the whole intellectual 
and moral reality. The infinite perfectibility of intelli- 
gence and will would be abruptly arrested. Truth and 


80 Immortality 


goodness would lose their deepest meaning and most 
intrinsic value. 

We know that the more the mind develops itself in 
the research of truth, the more fully it equips itself for 
further understanding. The intense exercise of mental 
powers refines and spiritualizes man; it increases his 
metaphysical powers, it fits and prepares him for more 
direct intuition and clearer contemplation. 

The Psalmist, in his sublime vision of the gradual 
ascending of man, saw that each degree of perfection 
attained by his soul is a step to a higher and more 
glorious spiritual liberty. The just “ascensiones in corde 
suo disposuit”; he goes “de virtute in virtutem” (Ps. 4. 
v.: 5-7, Vulgate). 

If the conscious self of man were to be lost into the 
totality of the spirit, all this mental equipment would 
become quite useless. The highest intelligence, the 
deepest acumen, the most luminous genius, in being ab- 
sorbed into the universality of the spirit, would either 
lose, at once, the possibility of further development, or 
(if we were to admit that the universal unidentified 
spirit is capable of mental activity) it would descend to 
the level of the average spirit-mentality. 

Likewise the moral perfectibility of the soul would 
abruptly come to an end. The God-like powers, devel- 
oped in the soul by the constant exercise of love, would 
be denied continuity of ascensional life. The great 
moral personalities of a Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of 
Hippo, Francis of Assisi, and of all the sublime heroes 
of love, would end into a meaningless absorption by the 
universal spirit. They would find themselves in a chaotic 
touch with the degrading, repulsive spirit of all the 
egoists, the tyrants, the monsters of mankind. 


Self-Conscious Personality and Immortality 81 


Could a more absurd kind of life be conceived? The 
survival of man’s personality is, consequently, demanded 
on the ground of the absolute reality of truth and 
goodness. 


That each, who seems a separate whole, 
Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
The skirts of self again, should fall 
Remerging in the general Soul, 


Is faith as vague as all unsweet: 
Eternal form shall still divide 

The eternal soul from all beside; 
And I shall know Him when we meet. 


a 


CHAPTER 'V: 
HOW CAN PERSONALITY SURVIVE? 


I 


If the fact of the permanence of the “self”, or per- 
sonal Immortality, is beyond doubt, the mode of such 
survival of personality offers a large field for specula- 
tions. The nature itself of the problem, as is the 
case in all psychical and metaphysical matters, rebels 
against a scientific investigation, based on purely experi- 
mental method and process. In the realm of metaphys- 
ical reality to ask scientific evidence is to demand the 
impossible. We must satisfy ourselves with hypotheses, 
theories and opinions. 

How, then, the conscious “self” of man can survive? 
If we resolve man into his constitutive elements, or, 
better, if we consider separately the concepts by which 
we express, in turn, his reality, we find out that the 
notion of death becomes to some of such concepts, but | 
is foreign and inapplicable to others. 

However, the unique reality which verifies these 
divers and opposite notions is the “ego”. What notion 
are we to apply to the “ego’’? Can we say, at once, 
that the “ego” dies insofar as it is a physical body, but 
it does not die insofar as it is thought and will? 

Pressed by the difficulty of this question, philoso- 
phers and scientists have followed three ways. 

The first, the easiest and simplest, is that of dividing 
man in two, i.e., body and soul. The body disintegrates, 
while the spirit, or soul, returns to the sphere wherefrom 


82 





How Can Personality Survive? 83 


it had descended. The body dies, so the popular expres- 
sion runs, and the soul lives. 

But anyone who knows a little of philosophy realizes 
that the simplicity of such explanation is only apparent. 
It is a mere dualism, which explains nothing. For, on 
one hand, we know that two are not one. The unity of 
the “ego”, an act of consciousness, is a spiritual act, 
and, consequently, pure spirituality. It is, at the same 

time, self-consciousness of the body, and, therefore, 
_ pure corporality. 

On the other hand, a finite spirit, which, in the proc- 
ess of its “becoming” is a pure spiritual act of what 
we call finite concreteness, and a limitation of space, 
time, and matter, is outside our experience. Also a 
matter, which is not pervaded, somehow, by spirituality, 
is inconceivable. 

The distinction and duality, involved in this first 
answer, did not succeed in remaining radical and orig- 
inary, and was, consequently, compelled to reduce itself 
to unity. 


If 


Dualism having been put aside, thinkers sought the 
synthesis of the opposite principles either in rationality 
or in matter, in idealism or positivism. 

Positivism, renouncing to the substance-individual, to 
the monad-soul, resolved the “ego” into the natural 
formations of physical and chemical reality. 

On the other hand, idealism converted the substance- 
individual into the one, infinite, and Becoming reality 
of the spirit. 

Both these radical doctrines deny all possibility of 
attributing consistency, beyond death, to the “ego”, as 


84 Immortality 


an empirical subject and a fugitive moment of a partial 
“becoming”. 

However, after a century of endeavours, by the cham- 
pions of both systems, dissatisfaction remains. For, if 
reality is interpreted in terms of pure thought, the 
concrete, the individual, the “ego” (which is this ego, 
and not another, or all the others) vanishes into the 
empty universality of the idea. If, on the contrary, 
reality is interpreted in terms of material concreteness, 
the idea fades away into an illimited nominalism, and 
the spirit disappears as a concrete and living synthesis 
of unity. 


Til 


Two intermediate solutions have been attempted. 
The one consists in a “psychical materialism”, which 
although purposing not to renounce the fundamental 
exigencies of materialism, places the human “ego” or 
psyche, in a reality less heavily corporeal than physical 
organism, which would be, somehow, its involucrum, 
aliment and instrument. 


Psycho-materialists maintain that this principle of 
physio-psychical life can, by the development of corpor- 
eal life, (which would correspond to an embryonal and 
larva-like period of existence) gradually constitute itself 
and acquire contact with a vaster and more subtle 
matter, as the psychic facts allow us to suppose. 

The active life-principle, as understood by psychical 
materialism, is able to come out of the involucrum, 
without ceasing to be, and recommence its way and life 
in a less material world, inaccessible to us. 

This is the direction taken by Fechner, in his: “Uber 
die Seelenfrage” (of which Paulsen gave us a second 
edition in 1907). It is also the road pursued by Pro- 


How Can Personality Survive? 85 


fessor Myers, many other spiritualists, and all the 
representatives of that movement and method of investi- 
gation which culminated in the London’s “Society for 
Psychical Research”. 


On the other hand, we have a kind of attenuation of 
absolute idealism in the “personal idealism” of a recent 
English school, in the “activism” of Eucken, in the 
“objective idealism” and other doctrines, wherein the 
constitution of personality acquires, in the spiritual 
world, a central significance. For personality, far from 
losing itself in spiritual unity (in which, indeed, its 
deepest roots lie) enters the center of life, and con- 
solidates itself, through the process of self-consciousness 
and the acceptance of moral exigencies. 


Both these doctrines are intermediate steps. They 
return either to dualism or pluralism. They do not 
entirely escape the criticism advanced against absolute 
materialism and idealism. Psycho-materialism and at- 
tenuated absolute idealism do not succeed in building 
up to themselves a strong dialectic basis. However 
they offer a large field for speculations, which, if not 
altogether barren, yet are far from being fecund of 
conclusive evidence. 


IV 


It is not surprising, then, that a more recent phil- 
osophy has endeavoured to free itself from all diffi- 
culties, by denying the possibility of solving dialecti- 
cally the problem of personal Immortality. 

The pretension to rationalize the universe, and 
understand human personality in its intrinsic and con- 
stitutive elements has been regarded as vain and use- 
less. The prablem of Immortality, insofar as it is 
the affirmation of the permanence of an “ego”, sub- 


86 Immortality 


tracted from the vicissitudes of the cosmos and. the 
“becoming”, has been declared to be outside our pos- 
sibility of sure knowledge and intellectual experience. 


In the “pragmatism” of W. James, and, more acutely, 
in the “intuitionism” of Bergson, the whole intelligence 
is instinct, immediateness of vision, intuition. A reflec- 
tion of thought on the totality of the being, and, conse- 
quently, on the essence of the “ego”, is, thus, excluded 
by the very nature and task of intelligence, whose cir- 
cumscribed functton is directed by its instinct as well as 
by the exigencies of life. A mental reflection on the 
essence of the “ego” is, therefore, contained in, and 
exceeded by, the totality of the being, unseizable in its 
complex. 


V 


Such, in brief, is the contribution of systematic 
reason to the questions which men perpetually address 
to themselves: What is life? What is death? 


In order to answer them, philosophy ought to have 
previously answered these other questions: what is 
the “ego”?; from what does it proceed my being “my- 
self’, and not somebody else’s?; what is the origin of 
the subject of consciousness and self-consciousness?; 
what is the source and meaning of the unity and syn- 
thesis of that process of acts which the categorizing 


and dissecting reason affirms to be the whole of one’s 
“self” ? 


Philosophy has not, and could not, answer these 
questions. Like Bergson, philosophy repeats (thus re- 
habilitating Scholasticism) that it has to do with notions 
and essences alone, while the act of the being, per- 


How Can Personality Survive? 87 


petually pursued, perpetually escapes. The TeEOivaas 
the act of the being, as a “quid” concretely existing, 
is beyond its domain: “individuum ineffabile”. 


VI 


This incomprehensibility of the permanence of the 
“ego” has led many to the definite renunciation not only 
of the possibility of our understanding it, but also of 
the fact of its objective reality. Nothing could be more 
unjustified than this confusing the mode of the per- 
manence of personality with its reality. | 

The fact that we do not know how the “ego” survives 
is no reason for denying, or doubting, the survival itself. 
Because the actual alterations in the nervous system 
are not exactly known from physiological experiments 
we should, by no means, be warranted in denying the 
fact of nervous alterations. Our ignorance as to why 
given modifications of the nervous system are accom- 
panied by given states of consciousness could not be a 
sufficient reason for refusing to admit the reality of 
consciousness. 


Again, in the analysis of mental activity we do not 
know the exact boundaries where the physical process 
ends and the psychical begins. Yet we could not over- 
throw the fact that the brain is the place where those 
two processes meet. Yet again. We do not know 
why and how organic continuity is accompanied by self- 
conscious personality. Yet we cannot call in doubt this 
psychical reality. 

True, philosophy, unable to answer the questions: 
what is life?, what is death? can only help man to ad- 
dress to himself, with a greater logical clearness, these 
two fundamental inquiries. Yet man, the maker and 


88 Immortality 


elaborator of philosophy, realizes that the Immortality 
of the “ego” is necessarily affirmed by an act of the 
intellect and will. 


The baby new to earth and sky, 
What time his tender pala is pressed 
Against the circie of the breast, 

Has never thought that “this ts I”: 


But as he grows he gathers much, 
And learns the use of “I” and “me”, 
And finds “I am not what I see, 
And oiher than the things I touch”: 


So rounds he to a separate mind 

From whence clear memory may begin, 
As through the frame that binds him in 
His isolation grows defined. 


This use may lie in blood and breath, 
Which else were fruitless of their due, 
Had man to learn himself anew 

Beyond the second birth of Death. 


CHAPTER VI 


— 


MORAL CHARACTER OF THE SOUL 
AND IMMORTALITY 


I 


The strongest proof for Immortality is, doubtless, 
deduced from the moral character of the soul. 

Moral will is the supreme characteristic of man. No 
truer definition of man could be given than that describ- 
ing him as an essentially moral personality. “Homines 
nihil aliud quam voluntates”, wrote the fine psycholo- 
gist of Hippo, St. Augustine. The real significance of 
the soul consists in moral activity. 

The beasts perform, though unconsciously and rudi- 
mentarily, all the processes of mind. They understand, 
they remember, they possess emotional powers, they 
are endowed with a will. But they have no conception 
of Deity, and, consequently, their soul is lacking moral 
character. The faculty to recognize a Supreme Being 
and the capacity to apprehend him belong exclusively 
to man. 

Man, it is said, is a body, a mind and a soul. The 
first of these attributes belongs to man and beast. The 
second is also shared, though in different proportion 
and degree by both. But the third is an exclusive 
possession of man. 

The phenomenon of the soul is the “experimentum 
crucis’ of materialism. Positivistic science can account 
for all phenomena, except that of the soul. It is able to 
discover resemblances between beast and man in physi- 





89 


90 Immortality 


cal structure, physiological functions, emotional feelings 
and intellectual faculties. But here the resemblance 
ceases. Here materialism becomes silent: “And man 
became a living SOUL.” 

That soul cannot be either physical existence or men- 
tal power, of which man is participant in common with 
all other animals. It is a capacity to recognize the 
existence, truthfulness and justice of a Supreme Being. 
It is a Godward power, an aspiration to the Infinite, 
a sharing in the Absolute. It is a moral character, 
an ethical relation, a religious reality. 


II 


Man’s moral will has a character of absoluteness. 
St. Augustine teaches that the Immortality of the 
soul follows from its participation in the eternal truth. 
We add that it follows, even more directly, from its 
participation in the absolute good. Immortality is a 
fundamental postulate of the will to good, conceived as 
a will of the absolute and the eternal. 


In the affective states of our souls we discern what 
is occasional and fugitive, what is caprice, ephemeron 
and momentariness from what, answering to our most 
intimate nature and proceeding from it, exacts stability 
and perenniality. 


By this criterion we distinguish our good acts from 
the bad ones. What we feel to be, and call, evil, does 
not, by any means, appear to us as unworthy to be 
willed. If it were so, we would not will it. We will it, 
because, here and now, it is, somehow, good for us. 

What we see in it is its precariousness. We notice 
the fact that that good (which is really evil) is being 
suggested to, and almost imposed upon us, through 
our weakness, by something which is outside of us, and 





Moral Character of the Soul and Immortality 91 


which we ought, yet do not know how, to dominate. 
We realize that that good is not co-ordinable to a will 
which is known and possessed in its entirety, i. e., 
moral will. 

That good is an actuality, but fragmentary, dispersed, 
heterogeneous. It is not an act of the interior “ego”. 
It is not an act which can be reduced to totality or 
absoluteness, both of the will and its object. 

Where the whole will is a momentary equation of 
concrete subject and. object, every act is wholly ex- 
hausted in itself, and, consequently, there can be neither 
good nor evil, as in the beasts and in human infancy. 

Only when the actual will is no longer an actuality 
entirely defined by its immediate and concrete object, 
but an awareful placing of the same object in the 
realm of scopes and finalities, (or, in other words, a 
consciousness of pure and absolute will) is there a dis- 
crimination between good and evil. 

Moral distinction takes place only when the will 
becomes awarefulness of the “ego”, which, in the suc- 
cessive acts and states of consciousness, though remain- 
ing one, yet is being increased and interiorly enriched 
by the possession of itself and of things. Moral valua- 
tion is borne at once with this mobile and yet rectilinear 
self-consciousness, which transcends, both as a subject 
and an object, all concreteness of given and determined 
things. | 

The good is, therefore, for us, as well as in itself, 
what is willed, not for, and in, the moment, but “sub 
specie aeternitatis”. It is what is “absolutely” willed. 

If all is ephemeral, if all passes away and changes 
itself, it does not pay to will anything, or even possess 
a will. Such is the doctrine of radical evil. Schopen- 
hauer, after Indian philosophy, has given us the demon- 
stration thereof. 


92 Immortality 


Accordingly, the “maximum” of wisdom will be to 
inebriate oneself with the moment, to dionysiacally enjoy 
the conquest and possession of what appears either good 
or evil in itself, without relation to the hereafter and 
the beyond. From Schopenhauer descends Nietzsche. 

The object, worthy to be willed, must be able to be 
willed “per se”, in itself, as a transcendent reality, and 
actuation of an eternal and universal rule of the spirit. 
This is equivalent to saying that the object must be 
reducible to this_spiritual norm and containable therein. 
In other words, the will (since it creates its object and 
gives it that perenniality and absoluteness which it in- 
trinsically possesses) must recognize itself, in the value 
of its good act, as eternal and absolute. 


Iil 


Thus Immortality is essentially implicated by the 
good will. The will which establishes and actuates an. 
absolute norm, and wills transient objects only insofar 
as it removes them from the sphere of the impermanent 
and puts them in existence as absolute objects of an ab- 
solute willing, is a will that does not, and cannot, die. 
Human will is ensphered in the eternal. 

Death, as such, is the category of the “unmoral”, and, 
in man, of the “immoral”. Who wills the evil, is a 
creator of death, an originator of wars, a destroyer. On 
the contrary, the category of the good is that of life, 
of the Eternal, of Immortality. 

Two objections can be advanced against this doctrine. 
The one is that our arguing regards the will in its unt- 
versality, and not this single will of ours, and, conse- 
quently, Immortality may accrue to the universal spirit, 
but not to the individual and empirical spirits. 

Such difficulty is easily solvable. If absolute spirit is 
not a pure abstraction, this spirit of mine is the abso- 


Moral Character of the Soul and Immortality 93 


lute. What is outside myself, and of every act of con- 
sciousness developing into self-consciousness, is also out- 
side the Spirit, is a non-reality. What is denied by this 
spirit of mine is denied by “the” spirit, and vice-versa. 
If I have the right to affirm that “the spirit is immortal’, 
I am also justified in saying: “I am the immortal spirit”, 
and, as such, I think, will and act for eternity. 

The other objection is that, even if we admit this 
internal dialectics of the will, we do not know whether 
the will itself and this content of it are a reality or an 
illusion. We mortals are, in substance, but an experi- 
ment in the making. How and to what will such experi- 
ment, full of contrasts, succeed? 

The answer to this difficulty is also at hand. The 
act of the will, the will itself, which wills its object and 

actuates in it an eternal value, is “before” all our acts, 
and “in” each of them. It is the absolute and transcen- 
dental “prius”. As he who thinks cannot help thinking, 
even if he denies thought, so he who wills cannot help 
willing, even if he wishes to deny the will. 

In one single act, in each of our acts, the whole will 
is implicated, with all its exigencies. Doubt, absolute 
pessimism, nihilistic scepticism is a critical reflection, an 
undoubling of the act of the will, an object of the will, 
and, as such, it is the absolute. The nothingness, the 
nirvana, becomes the supreme good, and the thirst of 
both men and gods. 


IV 


We may substitute the word “love” for will, and come 
to the same conclusion. Immortality is a fundamental 
postulate of love, conceived as an absolute value. True 
and deep love, the love which is not a momentary cap- 
rice nor a sensual enjoyment, goes from the whole being 
to the whole being. It is, in the same degree, possession 


94 | Immortality — 


and dedication of self; put to test, it is supreme self- 
sacrifice. Now then, man can live for futile things, but 
he does not die, consciously and willingly, except for 
eternal things. 

True love, which appropriates the object to itself, 
identifies itself with it, surrounds it with a kind of per- 
renial consecration, conceives that object beyond all con- 
tingencies of life and as having an absolute and eternal 
value. Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, in the ceaseless 
infernal whirlwind, are bound by a love and a sorrow 
eternal. 7 

All forms of life are frail, and man is fully conscious 
of it. All empirical objects dissolve themselves; and 
yet love is a radical negation of this death, it fights 
against it, it affirms the realities which are beyond 
space and time. 

If the love of ourselves appear a suspicious judge, the 
love for fellow-men, the fatherland, friends, the ideal, 
is a more acceptable witness. For it.implies the most 
unselfish and purest thinking, doing and giving. It is 
wholly turned toward the future. It is exigency and a 
partial position of an ulterior reality, for the sake of 
which the whole life appears well employed. 

If this act of love, in which life is summarized, is above 
itself and the moment, if actuality is inferior to it, it 
transcends also the whole series, or, rather, annuls it 
as a series and conceives it as an absolute actuality, 
as perenniality. 

The Christian martyr who prefers to die rather than 
renounce his faith in Christ, puts his act in eternity. 
Likewise the reformer, who sacrifices himseli on the 
altar of the religious and moral ideal, gives his act a 
character of absoluteness. The American soldier who, 
for the sake of justice and human liberty, gives up his 


Moral Character of the Soul and Immortality 95 


life on the battlefields of France, acts within the sphere 
of absolute reality. 

A conscious supreme self-sacrifice, an heroic renun- 
ciation of life, for the sake of a relative and ephemeral 
object, is an absurdity. 

If everything, in men who love as well as in what 
they love, were mortal, there would be, in the act of 
love, something “plus”, a “residuum”, which is vanity 
and illusion, and yet, at the same time, the very sub- 
stance of love. Consequently, love and universal vanity 
are irreconcilable, and, in the fulness of consciousness, 
one necessarily destroys the other. 


V 


This is not all. The “ego” may be considered from 
a triple point of view. There is the grossly “empirical” 
ego, which may seem entirely absorbed by external vic- 
issitudes, in whose flow it moves itself and is moved. 
It appears essentially circumscribed by the narrow 
boundaries of such vicissitudes. 

There is, besides, the “transcendant” and absolute ego 
of philosophy, which conceives and realizes both itself 
and the world as a dialectical and volitional process, of 
which the concrete individuals are but self-multiplying 
exemplifications and infinitesimal moments. 

There is, finally, the real and “moral” ego, that is the 
consciousness which becomes self-consciousness, the per- 
sonality which fights to constitute and conquer itself, 
and, in itself, the world, by making it not only ‘“itsown’, 
but “itself.” 

The process of moral life consists in this vigilant, as- 
siduous, powerful endeavor by which man seeks to real- 
ize himself as a spirit and the divine exigencies of the 
spirit, which find their greatest expression in the pure 
religious precept. 


96 Immortality 


On one hand, moral conscience tends to elevate itself 
to this universal and absolute norm of the good; on the 
other, by an identical process, it aspires to develop itself, 
more and more, as a conscious “ego,” to obey an interior 
law, and to replace heteronomy with autonomy. In brief, 
it moves in the direction of being more fully, consciously 
and spiritually “self”. The maximum of universality 
coincides with the maximum of personality. 


Is it, then, possible, that this process of moral life, 
insofar as it is a.growing affirmation of the true “ego”, 
and causes such affirmation to be the supreme law of 
life, may end in nothingness? Is it possible for moral 
consciousness to accept such conclusion, which contra- 
dicts its first and supreme exigence, ie. “Be the uni- 
versal”, translated by the same process into the other 
formula: “Be thyself”? 


This would amount to saying to moral consciousness: 
Gather and concentrate thyself, by dominating thy in- 
ferior instincts and cuttig off all that impedes ad delays 
thee; measure usefulness, pleasure and sorrow only from 
the view-point of their contribution to thy spiritual 
“ego”, because the ultimate issue of all this work of 
thine will be the definite and complete annulment of 
the same!” . 


Were we to deny moral exigence the character of ab- 
soluteness, we would speak to man thus: “Be an 
apostle, a hero, a martyr, a saint, because all that for 
which you stand, fight, suffer, agonize will finally perish, 
your attainments will vanish, your great dream of per- 
fection will be abruptly wiped out, all your ideals, hopes, 
sweet presentments will be cruelly shattered. Grow in 
mind and soul, lift thyself higher and higher, because 
the goal of all your evolution will be a sudden halt, the 
apex of your ascent will be engulfment into universal 
annihilation. Never cease to enrich thy inner self, be- 


Moral Character of the Soul and Immortality 97 


cause, for every “plus” of present endeavor there will 
be a “minus” of future result, the “maximum” of self- 
affirmation and ideal construction will be absorbed by 
a “nihil” of utter destruction, and the entire process of 
your existence will reduce itself to the supreme, tragic 
equation that X=QO. Overcome misery, crime, injus- 
tice, every form of evil, because all your victories and 
triumphs over the enemies of mankind will end into the 
final disaster of the grave. Dare to live, and make 
others live, for the sake of truth and love, because the 
flower of life, material as well as immaterial, is death.” 

Such, one might remark, is human being; it is the 
actuation of the absolute in the moment. Being so 
infinitely little, as we are, the absolute, even though it 
be in the moment, in a sufficient prize for us. 

But, we answer, the radical impermanence of the act, 
which actuates absolute values, would not, in such an 
hypothesis, coincide with the impermanence of the same 
values? What kind of absolute is this, to which only 
and always corresponds an infinitesimal and frail frag- 
ment, which is denied as soon as affirmed? 


Vi 


We may add that the development of personality 
is a gradual and ceaseless extension of it to new ele- 
ments of the interior, as well as the exterior, world. 
The life of the spirit consists in converting things into 
elements of living synthesis, of conscious personality, 
and of realization of the absolute. 

If every process resolves itself, historically, into the 
negation of the “ego”, the whole process of the being 
would definitely be a passage from the “ego” to the “non- 
ego’, to a “non-doing’, to a “non-actuating”. Life 
would work for death. The apex of the process, the 


98 Immortality 


“prius’, would be an absolute negation, the absolute 
nothingness. 


Unless we wish to admit such an evident absurdity, we 
are compelled to affirm the absoluteness of the process 
of moral life, which logically includes, and is equivalent 
to, the Immortality of man’s personality. 


The wish that of the living whole 
No life may fall beyond the grave, 
Derives it not from what we have 
The likest God within the soul? 


Se ee 


CHAPTER VII 
FAITH AND IMMORTALITY 


“What, then, ts man? He endures but an hour, and ts crushed 
before the moth. Yet in the being and in the working of a faithful 
man is there already a something that pertains not to this wild death- 
element of Time, that triumphs over Time, and ts and will be when 
Time shall be no more.’—-Carlyle. 


I 


The preceding pages make it clear that Immortality, in- 
sofar as .it is the vision of life “sub specie aeternitatis,” 
the realization of absolute values and good will (which is 
a will of the perennial and the universal) is the funda- 
mental postulate of action. To act well is to act for 
Immortality. Who does good, acts immortally. 

Eternal life is the very essence of a good act. If we 
are told that good will is in heaven, it is because absolute 
goodness, which good will recognizes and actuates, is 
heaven. 

Goodness is an affirmation of the permanence of val- 
ues; the permanence of values is permanence of the 
valuing spirit ; the permanence of the spirit is the perma- 
nence of “this” spirit, which is, in some incomprehensible 
manner “mine,” or, rather, “myself.” 

Faith in Immortality is, consequently, implicit in all 
good actions, for there is no evil deed or will, except in- 
sofar as it is judged and denied by the good will, at least 
implicitly. 

But such Immortality, implied by the reality of the 
idea of the good, is something more than the mere per- 
manence of the conscious “ego.” It is the permanence 


we 


soe 


100 Immortality 


of the “ego” raised to the conscious position, and the 
volition, of supreme and eternal values. It is, essentially, 
the realization of moral and spiritual personality. 

Secondly, this Immortality (which is that of the Chris- 
tian religion) is something more than the immortality 
implied in the very fact of human being. It is, indeed, 
a personal conquest. It is the attainment of reality de- 
fined in terms of moral value. 

This doctrine with regard to Immortality as being 
something which must be gained or acquired by moral 
and spiritual endeavour is in accord with all positive 
faiths, and, more especially, with the evangelical message 
of Christianity. One must “keep the commandments” if 
one, wills to enter into, life,, (St, Matt xix lene 
must “run,” in order to obtain the incorruptible crown. 
(I. Cor. IX: 24-25). 

Thirdly, this Immortality is the climax of a spiritual] 
evolution. As the material evolution in nature finds its 
goal, its completion and its significance in man, so must 
man enter immediately upon a higher spiritual evolution 
to find its fulfillment in the ideal man, the divine man. 

Christian religion presents the prototype of this God- 
like man in the God-man, Jesus the Christ. Christ is the 
highest and most concrete revelation of God the Spirit to 
men; therefore Christ-likeness means the highest spirit- 
ual development of man. | 

Fourthly, this Immortality is (why not say it?) will 
rather than intellect, mystery rather than science, re- 
ligious, rather than scientific, experience, hope rather 
than possession, divine promise rather than certitude of 
intuition. This Immortality is, in brief, faith. 

Intellect, philosophy, science are able only to prove 
that “there can be” Immortality; but it is the will which 
affirms that it “does exist.” Psychology and metaphysics 


———  .— «-_- 


Fath and Immortality 101 


can demonstrate that “there must be” Immortality; but 
it is religious experience that solemnly proclaims that 
“there is” Immortality. 


I] 


Science, in spite of the indefinite possibility of its prog- 
ress, will never succeed in deepening and strengthening 
the feeling of Immortality in men. It may gradually in- 
crease the force of its proofs as to the “non-repugnance” 
and the logicality of Immortality ; but Religion alone has 
been, and will be, able to make Immortality felt and lived 
as an active and fecund reality. 

It is from its religious character that Immortality 
derives its tremendous power and efficacy over humanity 
and the shaping of its destines. If the expectation of 
Immortality resulted from a rational conviction, a cer- 
tainty of intuition or dialectical evidence, it would have 
a very little part in the life of men. 


In order to believe in Immortality, men have always 
needed to admit it not as a consequence of the analysis 
of the life and ways of the Spirit, but as a divine promise, 
proved by a kind of religious experience. So lacking in 
strength has always appeared the former basis, and so 
necessary the latter! 

The divine words, addressed by the Master to the posi- 
tivistic apostle Thomas: “Blessed are they that have not 
seen, and yet have believed” (St. John XX: 29), which 
apply to all metaphysical reality, seem to be also true of 
Immortality. 


Ill 


In Christianity, Christ’s Resurrection is, according to 
the emphatic assertion of St. Paul, the central and all- 
dominating fact. Yet, let us dare to confess it, if Christ’s ' 


102 Immortality 


Resurrection were a thing which had no personal in- 
terest whatever, it is dubious whether there would be 
many disposed to admit it on the exclusive strength of 
the historical witness of the evangelical narrative. 

But the faith which the apostles and other primitive 
Christians had in it, becomes gradually the faith of 
countless ones, and the basis of great ecclesiastical in- 
stitutions. This faith may be pointed to as the most 
convincing and decisive argument for Immortality. 

Historical evidence alone does not account for the 
raising of the doctrine of Immortality to be the central 
and most vital dogma of Christianity, unless we take\it 
conjunctly with the “will to believe,” whose witness has 
appeared to many philosophers, most particularly to 
Kant, a sufficient foundation for the construction of the 
whole moral life. 

Often, even in our days, we have seen men (in whom 
the sentimental need of taking refuge in the faith in Im- 
mortality was strong) abandoning philosophy, in order 
to ask this or that among the authoritative Churches for 
the guarantees which they desperately wanted. So little 
men trust themselves and the witness of the interior 
“ego” in this matter! So inconsistent all desires of, and 
longings for, an ultra-earthly existence and happiness 
appear! So thick the shadow of death would fall on life, 
unless a ray of light, lighted above by a mysterious hand, 
rarefied it! 

Death, no less than life, appears to men as an incon- 
ceivable thing, a contradiction and a mystery. All posi- 
tive religions, eagerly accepted, liberate us from the 
painful suspicion that man may have been left in the 
dark of a complete ignorance as to what he is most in- 
terested in knowing. 

To believe in Immortality as a conquest of moral per- 
sonality, in the painful work of our self-constituting, is 


SPALL 


Faith and Immortality 103 


not only faith, but, in a certain sense, the whole faith. 
To work for what transcends all concrete actualities 
is the will which is more than all single wills, and, 
- consequently, before all concrete acts of willing, i. e. 
the “future.” 

What is to be actuated, what is always willed and 
never wholly completed, that exists in the present, and 
in my act of present willing, only as an exigency and a 
creation. The real, the actual, is not willed except for 
the “‘wn-real,” or, better, the “ir-real,’ the very soul and 
substance of that real, i. e. the future. 


IV 


Faith in God enters into the faith in Immortality. If 
there is God, He must be the unique God both of the 
dead and the living, or, rather, He must be “the God of 
the Living, and not of the dead” (St. Matt. XVII: 32). 
God’s dear ones, those whom He loved and consecrated, 
live: “Because I live, ye shall live also” (St. John: 
Vit e102), 

Immortality is implicated in the very fact that God, 
through creation, and, more concretely, through the In- 
carnation of the Word, miraculously adds Himself to the 
natural history of men, and, though He is beyond it, He 
works in it, to establish His kingdom among men. 


Earthly and visible history becomes, thus, the proscen- 
ium of true history, which develops behind the curtain. 
Earthly life is a preparation for, and an expectation of, 
the heavenly. To become deserving of it is the para- 
mount scope of life. Its attainment is worth all our re- 
nunciations and self-sacrifices. To miss it is the supreme 
terror of existence. 


Faith in God is not distinct from faith in Immortality. 
For, if our will is a will of the absolute and the infinite, 


a 


104 Immortality 


God is the only object that can present itself to the will 
as the absolute and infinite. 


The infinite object serves to express the infinite sub- 
ject, that is, the transcendence of the good-will, in its 
universality, over each single, concrete will. 


If in the place of the word “will,’ we put “love,” we 
shall have the definition of the Christian God. 


But, let us repeat it once more, this Immortality is, 
and can only be, will and faith. It has its origin and 
foundation in the hidden and mysterious insertion of 
our empirical “ego” in the absolute and the universal 
Spirit. | 

The pretension to know, the desire for evidence, the 
revelation of the world beyond, is a contradiction “in 
adiecto.” “To believe,” says beautifully the great Italian 
Modernist Don Romolo Murri, “is both our condemna- 
tion and our divine pride.” 


Immortality is the flower of faith, and the flower of 
Immortality is a life, turned, like the magnetic needle of 
the mariner’s compass, toward the north of the absolute. 


. . Death ever fronts the wise 
Not fearfully, but with clear promises 
Of larger life, on whose broad vans upborne 
Thew outlook widens, and they see beyond 
The horizon of the present and the past, 
Even to the very Source and End of things. 


CONCLUSION 


Once, upon the Galilean hills, a voice was heard, say- 
ing: “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never 
die” (St. John: XI: 26). No other God-sent messenger, 
no other revealer of religion, ever uttered words like 
these. They are worthy of one whois both man and God. 

To believe in Jesus, the Christ of God, means to believe 
in the eternal, the absolute, and to actuate it in life and 
action. It means to stand for a faith, a cause, an ideal. 
It means to work, fight and suffer for the sake of human- 
ity. It means to think of life in terms of service, devo- 
tion, self-sacrifice. It means to enthrone the spirit, as 
the supreme of all realities: “It is the Spirit that quick- 
eneth, the flesh profiteth nothing” (St. John: VI: 63). 

Believing in Christ is beginning, here and now, that 
spiritual evolution which will find its completion in the 
beyond and the hereafter: “Neither doth ERASE in- 
herit incorruption” (I. Cor. XV: 50). 

To have faith in Christ means to be ready to die, if 
need be, for the triumph of truth, love, justice, mercy, in 
brief, the universal spiritual reality. It means to lose 
oneself, in order to find oneself: “He that loseth his life, 
for my sake, shall find it” (St. Matt: X: 39). 

The men who believe in Christ are the ones who have 
come to the point of realizing, in their minds as well as 
their lives, that education, science, art, political leader- 
ship, economical progress, social uplift, great and desir- 
able things as they are, are not ultimate realities; that 
the greatest thing in the world is the soul of man, and 
that all the most splendid cultural and social conquests 


105 


106 Immortality 


are not worthy the slightest degree of spiritual and 
moral perfection. 


To live for the highest of all causes, i. e. spiritual reali- 


ty: here is the true act of faith. The self-sacrifice of the 
American soldier for the holy ideals of freedom, democ- 
racy and human brotherhood: here is the most trans- 
cending of all acts of life and will. : 


It is the firmest conviction, yes, and sweetest presenti- 
ment of the writer of these pages, that he, who thus 
lives and dies for God and men, enters, through a wide 
and magnificent doorway into the realm of Immortality. 


Mors lIanua Vitae. 


Jesus lives! thy terrors now 
Can no longer death appall us: 
Jesus lives! by this we know 
Thou, O grave, canst not enthrall us. 


Alleluia! 


Jesus lives! henceforth is death 
But the gate of Life Immortal: 
This shall calm our trembling breath, 
When we pass its gloomy portal. 
Alleluia! 


Dib i) 
ain) . A 
; hy i 
Lae 


f ay, 





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